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Dec 3

Guinevere's games tin boxes
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Fifteenth-Century Playing Cards from Guinevere’s Games

In the fifteenth century, playing cards were a novelty. Italian aristocrats commissioned hand painted, gilded trionfi decks from their favorite artists, while their counterparts farther north were doing the same with one-of-a-kind playing card decks.

Guinevere’s Games offers four fifteenth-century playing card decks through Gamecrafters. Three of these decks were hand painted luxury items, while the fourth is a basic black and white deck. These are not collectible facsimiles. They are printed in rich colors on smooth paper and could be easily shuffled and used for game playing. Each deck is housed in a tin and accompanied by background information. Here are details on each deck. Read more

Nov 13

Reader's Digest Capek Tarot de Marseille
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The Reader’s Digest Capek Tarot de Marseille

I associate the Reader’s Digest with seeing copies in a basket in my grandparents’ bathroom. Tarot just doesn’t seem to be aligned with the Reader’s Digest’s market niche; so I was intrigued when I learned that a Tarot de Marseille published by Reader’s Digest was on Ebay. Since it was only $11, I decided to satisfy my curiosity.

I’m very pleased with the quality of the cards and book, a collaboration between Czech artist Jindra Capek and writer Vlasta Duskova. The twenty-two cards are set into a niche at the bottom of a sturdy box which holds a 110-page hard-bound book that’s extensively illustrated in color. Read more

Nov 6

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Jodorowsky Retrospecitve

According to a review in the November 2015 issue of Art News, a museum in Bordeaux, France has just wrapped up a 50-year retrospective of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s career. In the photo shown here, peeking out from under the screen, you can see the bottoms of the Tarot de Marseille that Jodorowsky designed with Philippe Camoin. But Jodorowsky is about a lot more than tarot. Read more

Nov 3

Arcana: Tarot Poetry Anthology

Arcana: The Tarot Poetry Anthology

The poems in this important anthology take us on a ride from black jack tables to the Last Supper. Many poems gently evoke the essence of a card, like lingering incense. Others delight us with new insights, like Tony Barnstone’s paired poems on the same card upright and reversed; or Amy Schrader’s poems on court cards. The Devil has been transformed by Lore Bernier (I am restrained by a lack of restraint) and Amanda Chiado (He was the kid who only ate the icing). On these pages we hear the voice of a rather smug Temperance angel, a tricksterish Fool and a foolish Fool, and Judas as the Hanged Man. Read more

Oct 22

Spanish Captain Vandenborre deck
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The Spanish Captain in the Vandenborre Deck

Question: Who is the Spanish Captain, and what’s he doing in a tarot deck?

The Short Answer: He’s a character from the Commedia dell’Arte who substitutes for the Papesse in a type of 18th-century Belgian deck.

The Long Answer: Read the rest of the article.

What is Commedia dell’Arte?

It’s a type of popular theater with roots in the classical world. It flourished in Renaissance Italy and spread throughout Europe, especially France, in the 14th through 18th centuries. An array of standard characters appeared in every play like Harlequin, Pantalone, and Pulcinella, who was the prototype for Punch and Pierrot. The audience instantly recognized these characters by their masks, their walk, costume and regional accent, as well as characteristic slapstick routines, stage business, gestures, jokes, and favorite curse words. Read more

Oct 9

Fool cards from three soprafino decks
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The Three Soprafinos

Tarocchino Lombardo, the long out-of-print soprafino deck published by Il Solleone, fell into my hands recently. This gave me an opportunity to compare it with soprafino facsimiles by Lo Scarabeo and Il Meneghello. The the cards in the illustrations from left to right are: Lo Scarabeo, Il Solleone, Il Meneghello.

If you need a refresher on this deck style, here’s a page with everything you need to know.

The short version: About 1835, the printing house of Gumppenberg in Milan hired the artist Carlo Della Rocca to create an exquisitely beautiful engraved tarocchi deck. Since then, many of the deck’s unique design elements have been used in other decks printed in Lombardy and Piedmont. Read more

Sep 29

Cover Clear the Decks newsletter

52 Plus Joker: A Card Collector’s Club

I’ve just discovered an association for aficionados of antique and collectible playing cards called 52 Plus Joker – The American Playing Card Collector’s Club. (How about a tarot club called 21 Plus Fool?) Their beautifully illustrated quarterly magazine, Clear the Decks has plenty to keep a tarot historian happy. I’m very impressed with the level of scholarship in their articles – this isn’t just a hobbyist magazine. Read more

Sep 9

Arthur Hind History of Woodcut cover
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From my Bookshelf: History of Woodcut by Arthur Hind

Before tarot was a gilded status symbol for Italian aristocrats; before it inspired parlor games and poetry; and before it was a repository of occult correspondences, tarot was a set of paper cards printed in ink with wood blocks.

If we want to understand tarot’s formative years, we must understand the printing industry in the first half of the fifteenth century. Hind’s book gives a comprehensive survey of printers and their output, starting in the mid-fourteenth century, with an emphasis on the fifteenth century. Read more

Aug 27

Page of Cups
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Tarot: Haiku and Haibun

Tarot was the last thing I expected to see in the latest issue of Frogpond, the journal of the Haiku Society of America.

If you’d like to write haiku but feel constrained by its extreme compression, try haibun. Haibun consists of a few sentences or short paragraphs of prose with a haiku inserted somewhere. The haiku resonates with the prose but isn’t a literal illustration.

Here’s a tarot haibun by Alexis Rotella. Read more

Aug 20

Cartomancer magazine Autumn 2015 cover

The Cartomancer Autumn 2015 Issue

The second issue of this beautiful quarterly magazine just arrived in my mail box. I thoroughly reviewed the initial issue here, so this time I’ll just run down my favorite articles.

The feature article is an interview with Karen Mahony and Alex Ukolov, the owners of Baba Studio in Prague and the creators of The Alice Tarot (the cover illustration above). I was amazed at how much time and care went into the deck. The cards are not photoshopped collage. Mahony and Ukolov gathered costumes and props and went out on location to photograph each card. Their Tarot de Marseille is scheduled for 2016. I can’t wait. Read more

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