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In my early 20s, I went through a phase of compulsive Tarot deck collecting. I didn't pick up every Tarot deck I came across, but I was always looking for more and had very little self control when it came to a deck I liked. For a broke college student, my collection was a little out of control.
The pendulum swung the other way a few years later. I stopped compulsively acquiring decks and gave away a couple that no longer held my interest (or that never had). I reevaluated my wishlist on Aeclectic Tarot (RIP the forums) and found that most of them no longer held my interest, or at least not enough of it to justify buying more stuff.
This dry spell went on for years. A couple of times I ran across a deck with a neat concept, but it was never enough to get me to open my wallet. Until Baba Studios' Victorian Romantic Tarot. Something about the art absolutely fascinated me, and I found myself browsing images of the deck online when I had nothing better to do.
"The thing about being an adult," I realized, "is that if I want something nice, I can just buy it."
And so I did.
Today it's one of my favorite decks, but I always felt like there was more going on than what the deck's LWB was getting at. I knew there was a companion book, but it was out of print for a long time. Magic Realist press has finally put out a new edition (to match the third edition of the deck), which I had preordered as soon as they announced it.
Barbara Moore is the queen of companion books, it feels like, but I generally dislike the ones she writes. Nothing personalm—Moore is a heavy hitter in the Tarot community and she knows her stuff—I just like companion books to be written by the artist(s) themselves, so you can get all the dirt. Karen Mahony is half of the artistic vision behind The Victorian Romantic Tarot, so I was excited to get the scoop straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak.
The physical quality of the book is a little disappointing. It feels flimsy, and the pages are extremely glossy, almost like a magazine. I imagine this has something to do with printing technology and the full-color pictures of the cards they opted to use, and to that end it's a worthy sacrifice to make. It still feels a little weird to the touch. On the very cool plus side, my pre-ordered edition came signed!
Mahony opens with a brief history of how the deck came to be, as well as a short primer on Victorian art: its recurring motifs and themes, the social norms reflected in it. As is standard with any book on Tarot, she then continues with a brief history, some tips for learning how to read, and spread suggestions. I skimmed over these sections to get to the meat of things; namely, the exegeses on their particular interpretation of the cards themselves.
Mahony provides keywords for the cards upright as well as reversed, and then devotes a page (sometimes two) to her thoughts on the card in general and the connection between her understanding of the card and how it's portrayed in this deck. If there were changes to a card between editions, she also includes what those changes were and why they were made. At the end of each short essay, she also includes (when possible) a biography of the original artist of a particular painting or engraving, as well as a (black and white) reproduction. Alas, sometimes the artist is unknown, or so obscure that only their name remains. (Many of the images were sourced from commercial products like magazines or postcards, where artist attribution wasn't particularly important.)
This is exactly the kind of stuff I want to see in a LWB, but then if you tried to cram all of this in a LWB it wouldn't be so little anymore! The keywords for reversals in particular will probably be incredibly helpful for many readers; in every card there was always a point or two Mahony raises in the reversal keywords that made me go, "Oh, now there's an interesting perspective, but that makes a lot of sense." Quite frankly, I don't understand why they aren't included in the LWB (at least, not in the second edition, which is the one I own).
What this companion book highlights in particular is the feminist (or at least woman-centered) framework that Mahony and Ukolov were working in when constructing the deck. By Mahony's own admission, the source material they were working with "was often highly sensual and even, at times, salacious...and depicted women as objects rather than people." Faced with this, Mahony and Ukolov decided "to include several beautiful images of lightly-dressed women, nymphs, fairies, and mermaids, but avoid any whom we felt looked victimised...[and] to use several pictures of confident, independent women." This feminist theme recurs in Mahony's discussion of particular cards as well (for example, in the original version of The Devil used in the first and second editions of the deck).
The Victorian theme is also prevalent throughout the work. Beyond simply taking beautiful art to make a gorgeous Tarot deck, Mahony and Ukolov clearly brought some of the Victorian context into the meaning and thinking about the cards: circuses, fallen women, funeral customs, that sort of thing. All of that provides a deeper level of meaning when reading with this particular deck. This is a companion book that also enriches your understanding of the classic Waite-Smith deck: the art and the social norms highlighted in this deck would have no doubt influenced Waite and Colman-Smith, whether directly or indirectly. Flipping through the deck, it's fun to imagine which images may have caught Pixie's eye back in the day and worked their way, however subdued or altered, into the Waite-Smith deck we all know and love today!
Overall, I consider this companion book an essential part of the deck itself, up there with The Russian Tarot of St. Petersburg's companion book. This goes double for any Tarot beginner who's chosen this gorgeous deck as their first (or one of their firsts); the introduction is full of good advice for developing your Tarot practice and a good, basic history of the occult usage of the cards. I'll be sure to keep this close by whenever I'm reading with the Victorian Romantic Tarot.
The pendulum swung the other way a few years later. I stopped compulsively acquiring decks and gave away a couple that no longer held my interest (or that never had). I reevaluated my wishlist on Aeclectic Tarot (RIP the forums) and found that most of them no longer held my interest, or at least not enough of it to justify buying more stuff.
This dry spell went on for years. A couple of times I ran across a deck with a neat concept, but it was never enough to get me to open my wallet. Until Baba Studios' Victorian Romantic Tarot. Something about the art absolutely fascinated me, and I found myself browsing images of the deck online when I had nothing better to do.
"The thing about being an adult," I realized, "is that if I want something nice, I can just buy it."
And so I did.
Today it's one of my favorite decks, but I always felt like there was more going on than what the deck's LWB was getting at. I knew there was a companion book, but it was out of print for a long time. Magic Realist press has finally put out a new edition (to match the third edition of the deck), which I had preordered as soon as they announced it.
Barbara Moore is the queen of companion books, it feels like, but I generally dislike the ones she writes. Nothing personalm—Moore is a heavy hitter in the Tarot community and she knows her stuff—I just like companion books to be written by the artist(s) themselves, so you can get all the dirt. Karen Mahony is half of the artistic vision behind The Victorian Romantic Tarot, so I was excited to get the scoop straight from the horse's mouth, so to speak.
The physical quality of the book is a little disappointing. It feels flimsy, and the pages are extremely glossy, almost like a magazine. I imagine this has something to do with printing technology and the full-color pictures of the cards they opted to use, and to that end it's a worthy sacrifice to make. It still feels a little weird to the touch. On the very cool plus side, my pre-ordered edition came signed!
Mahony opens with a brief history of how the deck came to be, as well as a short primer on Victorian art: its recurring motifs and themes, the social norms reflected in it. As is standard with any book on Tarot, she then continues with a brief history, some tips for learning how to read, and spread suggestions. I skimmed over these sections to get to the meat of things; namely, the exegeses on their particular interpretation of the cards themselves.
Mahony provides keywords for the cards upright as well as reversed, and then devotes a page (sometimes two) to her thoughts on the card in general and the connection between her understanding of the card and how it's portrayed in this deck. If there were changes to a card between editions, she also includes what those changes were and why they were made. At the end of each short essay, she also includes (when possible) a biography of the original artist of a particular painting or engraving, as well as a (black and white) reproduction. Alas, sometimes the artist is unknown, or so obscure that only their name remains. (Many of the images were sourced from commercial products like magazines or postcards, where artist attribution wasn't particularly important.)
This is exactly the kind of stuff I want to see in a LWB, but then if you tried to cram all of this in a LWB it wouldn't be so little anymore! The keywords for reversals in particular will probably be incredibly helpful for many readers; in every card there was always a point or two Mahony raises in the reversal keywords that made me go, "Oh, now there's an interesting perspective, but that makes a lot of sense." Quite frankly, I don't understand why they aren't included in the LWB (at least, not in the second edition, which is the one I own).
What this companion book highlights in particular is the feminist (or at least woman-centered) framework that Mahony and Ukolov were working in when constructing the deck. By Mahony's own admission, the source material they were working with "was often highly sensual and even, at times, salacious...and depicted women as objects rather than people." Faced with this, Mahony and Ukolov decided "to include several beautiful images of lightly-dressed women, nymphs, fairies, and mermaids, but avoid any whom we felt looked victimised...[and] to use several pictures of confident, independent women." This feminist theme recurs in Mahony's discussion of particular cards as well (for example, in the original version of The Devil used in the first and second editions of the deck).
The Victorian theme is also prevalent throughout the work. Beyond simply taking beautiful art to make a gorgeous Tarot deck, Mahony and Ukolov clearly brought some of the Victorian context into the meaning and thinking about the cards: circuses, fallen women, funeral customs, that sort of thing. All of that provides a deeper level of meaning when reading with this particular deck. This is a companion book that also enriches your understanding of the classic Waite-Smith deck: the art and the social norms highlighted in this deck would have no doubt influenced Waite and Colman-Smith, whether directly or indirectly. Flipping through the deck, it's fun to imagine which images may have caught Pixie's eye back in the day and worked their way, however subdued or altered, into the Waite-Smith deck we all know and love today!
Overall, I consider this companion book an essential part of the deck itself, up there with The Russian Tarot of St. Petersburg's companion book. This goes double for any Tarot beginner who's chosen this gorgeous deck as their first (or one of their firsts); the introduction is full of good advice for developing your Tarot practice and a good, basic history of the occult usage of the cards. I'll be sure to keep this close by whenever I'm reading with the Victorian Romantic Tarot.
