Yeah, I bought a few actual garments...all from the same shop. (By the time I'd selected a few things and tried them on, I was pretty much done.) Fortunately they were having a clearance sale, so I managed to get several things for a good price. Of course, when I went up to pay, I realized I had left my bank card in the pocket of another coat (I remember thinking to myself when I dropped it my pocket the day before, 'Bad idea!',but I did it anyway), so I had to leave the items at the till and walk all the way home to get my bank card and return to the shop to pay! After that, you can be sure I was out of the mood to clothes shop, so I wandered in to The Works to check out the cheap books. I found, of course, a tarot deck. And of course, I bought it.
This particular deck is published by Top That Publishing and it seems to have been published under several different names. It is created by Bridget Reed and Colin Howard, and its first edition was called 'Cachet Tarot' which came out in 2003. Then it appears to have come out again 2012 in a box just labelled 'Tarot Cards'. This edition from 2013 is boxed as 'Tarot: Delve Into the World of Tarot Reading.' I paid £5.99 for it.
This edition comes in a box that opens right to left, like a book. Inside there is a compartment for the cards which has a clear plastic insert that fits over it to hold the cards in place. Under the inset, there is a 64 page book. The book would be of little use to newbies (and virtually of no use to 'adepts'), though at least I can say that it gives rudimentary versions of widely accepted contemporary meanings, with a few curious exceptions. She says the Knight of Wands 'signifies a departure from challenge. He is unsure of commitment and cannot confront his own feelings.' Really?? I suppose that is a super-polite way of saying he's the type of guy who might try to get in your pants one day and be long gone the next, which is actually very true of him. Ha ha. The single page on 'Tarot Origins' claims that the 22 majors came first, followed 'much later' by the 56 minors, so... so much for tarot scholarship here. (The author also says 'symbolisation' for 'symbolism' in one card entry, which just sounds SO awkward and wrong to me!) I do like the way she lays out the Celtic Cross, which I never thought of before. Instead of putting that line of cards upward to the right of the cross, she puts them in a row underneath, and lays them out right to left, which is a very old-fashioned way of doing it. I like the way it looks and will start doing that myself, on the rare occasion I use the Celtic Cross.
The cards are big, 6.75 x 4.25 inches (16 x 11 cm), but a bit on the thin side, so the stacked deck is roughly 1 inch high (about 3 cm). In thickness, for comparison, I would put it at slightly thicker than the Druidcraft, which is the thinnest card stock of any deck I own. It has a similar soft, slightly floppy quality. The cards have a matte finish. The paper is quite malleable so the deck would be prone to easy nicking and indentations. You can see from the illustration above that the cards have a wide, ornate border and the colours are quite saturated. The pip cards are semi-illustrated: the set number of wands, cups, coins or swords are superimposed on a set background which is exactly the same for each card in the suit. I don't mind this at all. One curious aspect is that the coins suit is called 'pentacles' and yet the cards contain griffin-headed coins --no pentacles in sight. Ha! It's not a high quality deck, it's just a cheapy, but I can say that I actually rather like it and I am pretty sure I will keep it.
Samples of pip cards:
Samples of majors:
Some courts (see how three won't fit the scanner??):
Of course, there's always at least one clunker in a deck, and this is it:
