The Monthly Aspectarian: Stuart, you have the largest collection of Tarot cards in the world.

Stuart Kaplan: That's correct, I have about 800 different Tarot decks. My guess is that about half of them have not been published. The artwork is in our archives. The other decks have been published by U.S. Games Systems or other companies throughout the world. We also have roughly 3,000 books on the history of Tarot and mystery playing cards, the earliest from 1526. And we have a vast private library and resources all dealing with Tarot and the history of playing cards, which definitely interests me from the historical standpoint.

TMA: How did you come by your interest?

SK: Back in 1968 I was working on Wall Street for a multi-millionaire. In February of 1968, on vacation, I decided to go to the Nuremberg Toy Fair in Germany to look for gifts for our five children. I was just looking around for what was interesting in the game and toy field and I found a Tarot deck -- that was a Swiss 1JJ Tarot deck from A.G. Moore and Sons, and I brought it back -- and in the first year I sold 200,000 of those decks.

Brentano's [a national chain of bookstore boutiques] in New York wanted to have a book that would go with the cards, so I wrote Tarot Cards for Fun and Fortune Telling. I knew nothing about it but I started researching. That book, Tarot Classic and the three-volumes of The Encyclopedia of Tarot have sold over one-point-one million copies and are translated into nine different languages. It was a hobby, mainly a historical research project, that turned out to be a business. I left Wall Street and started doing this full time as a publisher.

TMA: Then you started acquiring decks from all over. Are they pretty much all European?

SK: I'd say about 95 percent of the pre-1970 decks are European because very few Tarot decks were done in this country. There was the Albano Waite, there was the Rider-Waite deck -- but all the others were basically done in Europe and many of the decks I own are Tarot or tarock decks, tarock being 54 card or 78 card decks. That's the European card game played in the Eastern Europe countries, similar to Bridge but the fifth suit is pre-set by the major arcana cards whereas in Bridge you're bidding to decide what the trump suit is going to be. I have a lot of those decks from the nineteenth century, some hand-colored; I have three cards from the fifteenth century in gold that were hand-painted, from Italy. Of the collection, probably 100 to 150 decks are extremely rare, museum-type decks.

TMA: What is the best guess on how old Tarot cards are and the origin of them?

SK: I'm pretty sure Tarot started in the mid-fifteenth century. Cards, per se, began probably 1370-1380 in either Spain or Italy. You find some prohibitions from that time against playing cards. But Tarot seems to have started in the fifteenth century around 1440, 1450. The reason I know that is the earliest existing have the Visconti-Sforza heraldic images on the cards. That took place in Milan, which is in northern Italy, and they were dukes of Milan. So you had the Viscontis, the Sforzas, the Colleonis -- all had these cards. There are frescos that exist in Italy today from the fifteenth century of people playing with what they called trionfi cards, which are the forerunners of Tarot cards.

TMA: It's said that the cards were intended to convey metaphysical or occult truths in such a way that the Church wouldn't take notice. Have you found any evidence of that?

SK: No, I don't think the cards started that way at all. I think they started really as a game for the nobility in northern Italy. What happened is that in 1781 Court de Gebelin came to the idea that the major arcana were in hieroglyphics and he started this esoteric use of the cards. Another person by the name of Italia picked it up. It was basically the French that gave the esoteric meaning, cartomancy, to the cards.

TMA: It's as recent as the 1700s that it began to be used as a divination tool?

SK: Yes. There is a book I have from 1540 that shows using some suits for fortune telling, but in terms of the major arcana there might be one or two books that refer to applying symbols to these images -- but never really as a deck of cards like we spread them out today. That didn't really start until the late eighteenth century, in the 1780s, 1790s.

TMA: Are there any collections comparable to yours?

SK: Not really, but there are some beautiful playing card collections. Yale University has a beautiful deck of playing cards including 67 of the earliest Visconti-Sforza cards. Their deck is a Visconti deck that's 67 cards out of 86 cards. That particular deck had female knights and female pages, the only early deck that had that. So instead of 78 cards, the 22 major arcana, the 56 minor arcana, Yale University's deck, where they have only 67 cards still existing -- the original deck was actually 86 cards by adding in eight more cards, two cards in each of the four suits, a female knight and a female page. The Pierpont Morgan Library in New York City has 35 early fifteenth century cards. There are other good collections. The U.S. Playing Card Company has a very good collection of playing cards but very little Tarot; Bibliotheque de Ecole Nationale has cards at the British Museum; the British Library has cards. The biggest collector of regular playing cards is Albert Field in New York City, but no one really has the Tarot collection that I have.

TMA: What's your opinion of the explosion of decks that's occurred over the last thirty years?

SK: There were only a few decks in 1970-1971 when we started. The first deck we did was the Swiss 1JJ in 1968 but that had already been published; I just imported it. Then in 1970 we started publishing our own decks. I think it's really due to the fact of my interest at U.S. Games that publishing decks started. There's been just a lot of interest by people to collect them, to see decks with different symbolism and different allegorical images. It became fascinating to people. When you read a book, the pages are set. You read it once and you know what the story is. When you read a deck of Tarot cards and you keep shuffling the deck, well, you're changing the story every time -- so for a lot of people it becomes a fascinating adventure. I think people became attracted to that and the mysticism of it.

What really appeals to me is the origin, trying to separate fact from fantasy. That's why I've devoted myself to thirty years of research and trying to find out what's really true about these cards and what isn't.

TMA: What do you think about the decks that have come out in recent years that are used for divination but are not Tarot -- the so-called cartomancy decks, animal cards and others?

SK: I think Medicine Cards were a fantastic success for Bear and Company.

TMA: They sold a lot of them.

SK: And St. Martin's Press has bought the rights to that. I think those cards are really fascinating, but I don't think they're as fascinating as Tarot. Tarot cards have a history and people like to probe back over the last five centuries, who had it, where they came from, what they did with them . . . I actually went back in my Encyclopedia and listed every printer of a Tarot deck in the last 500 years -- where they lived, when they printed their decks, the watermarks and tax stamps on the decks. It took twenty years to write the three volume Encyclopedia, but it really became the definitive research. Now I'm doing volume four which has several hundred Tarot decks in it that have never been seen before. I hope to have it out in a year or two.

TMA: Are you adding these new decks -- the animal cards and other kinds -- to your collection or are you sticking to Tarot?

SK: I add them in the sense that we have a vast library here at U.S. Games in Stamford, Connecticut of anyone who does a deck of cards that's unusual -- not just poker or bridge -- but that's really not what I consider my collection; it's more research. If anyone in my company want to look up and see who's doing something on Native American . . . we do Native American cards, Civil War cards. It's always interesting to see who does what, so we have a vast private library here.

TMA: You've been doing research on Pamela Colman Smith, the artist who did the Rider-Waite Tarot deck?

SK: Yes. She was born in Middlesex, England in 1878 and lived in London, New York and also in Kingston, Jamaica. She is the one that actually did the Rider-Waite illustrations; she did them for Rider and Company in 1909. It became very interesting that her deck was the first that ever had full images on the pip cards, being the one to ten, the four suits, Swords, Wands, Cups and Coins. She had joined the Golden Dawn [an English occult fraternity], she had worked with Arthur Edward Waite [a writer of the occult]. Alfred Stieglitz selected her art as the first non-photographic work to be shown at the gallery called 291 on Madison Avenue. In 1907 he showed her work. She became friendly with him and before Georgia O'Keefe died, I wrote to her and got permission to reproduce the letter that Pamela Colman Smith sent Alfred Stieglitz in 1909 or 1910 telling him that she had just done a big job of 78 illustrations for very little money. That was the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. The original letter is at the Beinecke Library at Yale University.

TMA: The Rider-Waite deck is what most people think of as the Tarot deck. It's probably outsold every other deck many times over.

SK: Oh, by 500 to 1. That's the standard deck. Originally, people thought that Arthur Edward Waite had influenced her greatly to do the deck -- but a woman by the name of Gertrude Moakley, who died last year, was a New York librarian in 1938 who researched and found out that the Sola Busca Tarot cards which were done in the fifteenth century, had some of the pip cards as full illustrations. There are nine or ten of the cards from the Sola Busca deck that Pamela Colman Smith actually redid in her deck. So obviously, she had gone to either the British Museum or the British Library, researched and found that deck, and when she did her own illustrations, she drew heavily on those. It wasn't so much Arthur Edward Waite or the Golden Dawn; I think it was more Pamela Colman Smith and her own intuition that did the deck.

Unfortunately, she died dead broke in 1951 without any assets. No one could pay for her burial so she was put into a pauper's grave in Cornwall, England. When I went there ten years ago to try to find her gravesite -- we were going to erect a tombstone -- we were told that if you were destitute, your grave was actually put on top of another person's grave and after twenty-five years there was no way to find out where she was actually buried. The irony is that if you take a look at all the Rider-Waite decks we published -- times each card, there's probably a half a billion or more images of hers that are floating around the world. And she got no benefit from it.

TMA: Imagine the royalties she could have gotten.

SK: She worked with Ellen Terry doing theatrical costume design and theatrical stage design, but she was really very alone in life, never married -- she suffered from a lot of emotional and physical problems. Unfortunately, it's another case of someone who died penniless and obscure. Finding out about her was an interesting challenge.

TMA: Her contribution far overshadows how she ended.

SK: She tried to publish things like a broadsheet; she did some books, and they were all financial failures. Nothing seemed to work for her. She got a small inheritance and moved to a tiny village in Cornwall in southern England, where I went ten years ago. I advertised in the newspapers and went around to the different houses and asked people if they had any paintings or other materials from Pamela Colman Smith. I was able to find some of her paintings, a lot of her books as a child that she autographed, there was a guest book for five years from 1902 to 1907 autographed by the people who visited her. She used to do a lot of stories in Jamaican dialect. Children would sit in a circle around her. But she was financially just totally unsuccessful and really suffered.

TMA: You're going to honored at the Second World Tarot Congress here in Chicago where you'll be the keynote speaker. What will you be touching on?

SK: I'll talk about Pamela Colman Smith, and about how it was possible for me to sell $100 million worth of Tarot cards. Many people who have already talked know so much more about the esoteric aspect of Tarot that I think I need to talk about what it is that separates me, perhaps, from them -- because they're so much more knowledgeable than I am.

I need to talk about what my company did, our mission and goal, how we met these artists, how it came about. When we did the Chinese Tarot deck I actually walked around New York City trying to find a street artist who could draw in the Chinese design. I walked into a gallery and there was a Chinese artist who didn't speak English. I didn't speak Chinese, and it took a couple of years to get the deck done.

When I did the Japanese Ukiyoe Tarot it was the same thing. I corresponded with people in Japan and had the artist there send sketches back and I would make comments and send it back to him. I was always trying to get people to follow the standard symbolism. For the Russian Tarot, St. Petersburg, the artist was a Russian miniaturist, Uri Shakov; he knew nothing about Tarot. It turned out to be a beautiful deck. I've always loved Tarot symbolism. I've tried to come up with different ways to show it in different art forms.

Stuart Kaplan, a graduate of the Sorbonne and the Wharton School, is the founder and CEO of U.S. Games, Inc., a Stamford Conn. based company.

Next Article

Return to This Month's Index

Go to Homepage