Strange Attractor Press, in association with The Magic Circle Museum, introduce 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.
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.
Strange Attractor has created a Kickstarter to fund the publication of a new paperback edition as well as a physical edition of the deck itself, at, most likely, 65mm x114mm, (which is 1.14 times the size of the original cards) so that researchers and tarotists can handle the deck and explore its unique working features for themselves.
Austin Osman Spare Tarot Deck & Book by Strange Attractor Press — Kickstarter
See also the initial announcement: Austin Osman Spare Tarot Deck & Book by Strange Attractor Press – LAShTAL
Announcement repeated as the Kickstarter has reached its target.