About this site

Tirage Gratuit treats tarot as printed matter. Not as a practice and not as a belief system: as a manufactured object with an authorship record, a production cost and a distribution history.

The site is organised in three parts. The Drawing covers who held the pen and who wrote the brief. The Press covers stock, finish, print runs and the companies that manufacture most of what reaches a shop. The Mythology covers how an eighteenth-century guess about Egypt attached itself to a card game and outlived every fact that contradicted it. Collections accounts for named holdings in named institutions, and Glossary takes single terms and follows them through the printed record.

Where a claim is documented, the piece says so and names the source. Where it is not — the fee Pamela Colman Smith was paid, for one — the piece says that instead of inventing a figure. Photographs are credited to their photographers and institutions under each image.

The complete list of pieces is on the archive page.