KICKSTARTER: THE TAROT DECK OF AUSTIN OSMAN SPARE

Hello There,

Strange Attractor Press are excited to announce our first ever Kickstarter campaign... a unique opportunity to purchase a facsimile edition of the Tarot deck of Austin Osman Spare, alongside a new paperback edition of Lost Envoy: The Tarot Deck of Austin Osman Spare edited by Jonathan Allen, including significant new material!

PLEASE VISIT THE CAMPAIGN HERE
 

The esoteric and art historical significance of Spare's lost deck will be known to many of our supporters, and this Kickstarter will provide an opportunity to handle the deck's first ever physical reproduction. Given the incredibly high costs of printing, it's extremely unlikely that we will be able to publish the deck unless this kickstarter is succesfull, so we do hope that you will join us in making this project a reality!   

All the best,

Jamie & Mark

 

(Photo: Darren Martin)

 

Lost Envoy: The Tarot Deck Of Austin Osman Spare

In association with The Magic Circle Museum, we're excited to introduce an opportunity to purchase the long-awaited second edition of the long out-of-print book Lost Envoy: The Tarot Deck of Austin Osman Spare and, for the first time, a facsimile reproduction of the artist’s unique cartomancy deck.

 

The Book

In 2013, curator and artist Jonathan Allen discovered a 79-card, hand-painted tarot deck created c.1906 by the famed 20th century London artist and mystic Austin Osman Spare. This extraordinary relic of the British Occult Revival had lain practically unnoticed in the collections of The Magic Circle Museum in London since their accession in 1944.

Allen immediately recognised that Spare’s cards were not only art-historically significant, but also entirely unknown outside of The Magic Circle’s collections, and set about tracing the deck’s provenance, as well as its place in the artist’s oeuvre and within the wider histories of cartomancy.
 

In 2016, London-based Strange Attractor Press published Lost Envoy, a 336-page hardback book featuring over 200 full colour images. Lost Envoy reproduced Austin Spare’s tarot deck in its entirety for the first time, alongside new written and visual contributions from Jonathan Allen, Phil Baker, Helen Farley, Alan Moore, Kevin O’Neill, Sally O’Reilly and Gavin Semple.

The hardback edition, designed by Fraser Muggeridge Studio, sold out rapidly and now fetches extravagant prices on the collectors' market. We want to make the book available again, in a paperback format, at a relatively affordable price.

This new edition contains a substantial amount of new and revised material, including a major new discovery about Spare's sources for the attributions on his deck, hitherto unknown. 
 

The Deck

After many requests over the years, we also want to produce a physical edition of the deck itself, at approximately 1.5 times the size of the original cards, so that researchers and tarotists can handle the deck and explore its unique working features for themselves.

We'll be working with one of the world's most experienced printers of playing cards to create this hand-on facsimile edition, and ensure that the overlapping divinatory motifs found on many of the cards – a distinctive and unique feature of the original deck – are reproduced as accurately as possible. The deck's missing Strength card, of which only a black and white photograph survives, will be recreated in full colour and included in the facsimile deck.

We'll be offering bonus materials, including an enamel badge of one of the unique marginal motifs, a set of postcards and a cloth bag, and a few extremely special stretch goals – all of which will only be available to Kickstarter backers. Once published, the deck will be exclusively available directly from Strange Attractor Press and no other online sellers. 

It's very unlikely that we'll get another opportunity to reproduce the deck and Lost Envoy  in these high quality editions again, so we'd love it if you could help to support us in this very special project.