A catalogue of 35 historical tarot, oracle and cartomancy decks (1442-1909)

A structured catalogue of 35 historical tarot, oracle and cartomancy decks, from the Cary-Yale Visconti of about 1442 to the Rider-Waite-Smith of 1909. Each record carries the deck's name, approximate date and earliest year, century, kind, the number of cards originally made and how many survive, the maker or workshop, place of origin, the institution holding the survivors, and a link to that institution's own catalogue record where one exists. The catalogue is intended as a corrective to a common assumption about these objects: tarot was a trick-taking card game in fifteenth-century Italian courts for roughly three hundred and fifty years before Etteilla popularised its use for divination in the 1780s. Both eras are represented. Fields: slug, name, archive_no, approx_date, year_from, century, kind, cards_total, cards_surviving, cards_lost, maker, origin, description, holding_source, source_url, scans_available, url. Survival counts and holding institutions are populated for 32 of the 35 records; an empty field means "not recorded", never zero. Source and fuller per-deck entries: https://foolmade.art/archive