The Fountain Tarot

I collect Tarot decks. I don't collect them in a snooty way, at auctions or even on Ebay; I buy them mostly at bookstores and I pick out ones that have art that I like. I don't really use them for readings. If for some reason I want to think about some decision and what my options are, I will pull out the old Rider Waite deck (which should be named the Pamela Coleman Smith deck, IMO), because with that one I have the iconography memorized, and I don't have to keep flipping through the book to see what a card is supposed to mean. Every now and then I will use the Amy Zerner/Monty Farber deck because the art makes me happy and I can still figure out what each card corresponds to in the Coleman Smith deck :D

So I have decks of Angel art, and cats, and Stephanie Pui Mun Law's art deck, and a Celtic Tarot deck  that I lost the book that goes with it (and I should google it and rebuy it, because it's a non standard deck and the book was a good read), and an Art Noveau deck, and several other art decks. There were two decks that got shuffled off in moves, including the Aquarian deck (which is apparently a collectible now), and the old old Buckland Gypsy Fortune Telling Deck that my grandmother bought me and I managed to misplace some of the cards because they got incorporated in some art project, and I think that one is now a collectible as well. I normally don't lose things, but for some reason card decks in this house have legs unless I keep them in their boxes.

This deck is a particularily fancy deck--I only noticed it because it was on a sale table at Barnes and Noble, and it was a blind box purchase; they only showed a couple of the cards on the promo. Check out the silver card edges:

The art is superb. It more or less follows Coleman Smith's iconography but there are a lot of personal touches--I think the court cards show the artist's friends, and the portraits are delightful. The backs are lovely too:

The cards are stiff, like a lot of decks--you won't want to do a conventional Vegas shuffle with them, but deal them into piles, stack the piles, and then pick cards randomly face down so you won't crease or mar them. I am not planning on doing anything with them but treating them as tiny art pieces.

All 79 cards (there is one added Major; the Fountain) have complete illustrations, it was a labor of love. By the way, the box opens from the side with a magnetic catch:

I am embarrassed to tell you I spent 2 minutes trying to open it like a sliding Dollshe box. Luckily I didn't force anything!