REGISTER26 PIECES

Archive

Every piece on the site, in section order. The section pages carry the same material with its photographs; this is the short way to find a title you already know.

The Drawing

The Drawing
Pl.	Title	What it covers
01	Paid Once, Still in Print	Pamela Colman Smith illustrated seventy-eight cards for a flat fee in 1909. The deck bears her name today; the copyright revenue it generated for over a century did not reach her.
02	Waite Wrote the Brief, and the Pictures Are Not in It	The published record of what Arthur Edward Waite specified is thin. What Pamela Colman Smith drew is far richer — and the gap between the two is where the deck lives.
03	The Sola Busca Went on Show in London in 1907	The earliest fully illustrated seventy-eight-card deck reached a London exhibition two years before Pamela Colman Smith began drawing for Waite — and the comparison with her pip cards has been documented ever since.
04	Harris Repainted the Magus Until Crowley Stopped Asking	The Thoth Tarot took five years to paint, and one card — the Magus — was never settled. The published deck carries three printed versions because the commission's revision cycle outlasted Crowley's patience.
05	Before 1909, the Pip Cards Were Blank	Pamela Colman Smith drew fifty-six scenes that had never existed before — and every tarot artist since has had to decide what to do about that.
06	The Fool Has No Number, or the Number Is Zero	One card, two positions, and five centuries of editorial argument about where it belongs: the Fool, unnumbered or zero.
07	Salvador Dalí Designed a Tarot Deck in 1984	A late commission produced seventy-eight paintings that fuse Surrealist imagery with the Rider-Waite-Smith canon — and raised lasting questions about how much of the work was the artist's own.

The Press

The Press
Pl.	Title	What it covers
01	Why a Gilt Edge Drives Up the Unit Cost	Foil and pressure applied by hand after the cut: how one finishing step accounts for the largest single price gap between a standard and a luxury deck.
02	The Tuck Box Is the Part That Fails First	The cards inside a deck routinely outlast the box they came in — a consequence of engineering decisions made at print, not at the shelf.
03	Stuart Kaplan Founded U.S. Games Systems in 1968	The Stamford, Connecticut publisher became the dominant English-language tarot house by acquiring rights, building catalogue depth, and riding a decade of extraordinary market growth.
04	Lo Scarabeo Has Printed in Turin Since 1987	A Turin press built its catalogue on historical reproduction and licensed art, and now distributes to a global market from a single facility in Piedmont.
05	Fournier Has Been Cutting Cards in Vitoria-Gasteiz Since 1868	One of Europe's oldest card factories still runs in the Basque Country — now as a subsidiary of the Belgian giant Cartamundi.
06	The Independent Deck Boom After the Copyright Wall Fell	The entry of the Rider-Waite-Smith images into public domain, combined with print-on-demand economics, cracked open a market that had been controlled by three or four publishers for decades.
07	Most Decks Are Printed in One Province	Follow the shipping manifest, and almost every tarot deck in the world traces back to the Pearl River Delta.

The Mythology

The Mythology
Pl.	Title	What it covers
01	Antoine Court de Gébelin, 1781	A Protestant minister with a theory about ancient Egypt looked at a card game and launched a myth that outlasted the scholarship that refuted it.
02	The Cards That Reached Europe from the Islamic World
03	Éliphas Lévi Tied the Cards to the Hebrew Alphabet in 1854	A French occultist's published correspondence between tarot trumps and Hebrew letters became the structural skeleton of every deck the Golden Dawn ever touched.
04	The Golden Dawn Taught a System, and the System Became the Deck
05	Calvino Used a Tarot Pack to Build a Novel

Collections

Collections
Pl.	Title	What it covers
01	Seventy-Four Cards in Three Cities	The most studied tarot pack in existence survives incomplete, divided across two institutions and a private collection — and the gaps are as revealing as the cards themselves.
02	What the Morgan Library Holds, and How It Got There	The Morgan's fifteen Visconti-Sforza cards are the largest surviving fragment of the pack in one place — and their acquisition history is as layered as their gilding.
03	The British Museum's Playing-Card Collection	One of the largest systematically catalogued archives of historical playing cards in the world sits in Bloomsbury — and its tarot holdings have shaped the documented record of the medium.
04	A Museum Built Around One Subject
05	Nicolas Conver Cut His Blocks Around 1760, and Every Edition Still Argues With Them	The Marseille pattern is not a design — it is a set of tooling marks, accumulated across ink pulls and sharpened edges, that no digital scan fully settles.

Glossary

Glossary
Pl.	Title	What it covers
01	From Tarocchi to Tarot: What the Name Travelled Through	The word followed the cards north and west, changing its spelling at each border crossing.
02	How Seventy-Eight Became the Number	The 78-card structure feels axiomatic today. It was not always so, and not everyone has accepted it.