Hooked on TdM, sure. There's a lot of information to be found by doing searches, but it's all unfortunately a bit scattered.
A good place to start is searching for variants on the keyphrases "history of tarot playing cards," and generally speaking, sites dedicated to playing tarot tend to give some good introductory history because tarot is so much better known in English-speaking countries as cartomancy rather than a game. (Be warned, some tarot gaming sites get somewhat... resentful... of the prominence of cartomancy, so you might find some inflammatory stuff.)
Plain-old Wikipedia has a decently interesting article on playing cards in general, which features tarot, if you want some light reading that also doesn't take a lot of searching and dead-ends for scraps of info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Playing_card
If you're interested in getting very involved, the Tarot History forum is an interesting site that's out of my depth that I'd eventually like to come back to once I have a bit more info (not to say they're alienating, just that there's a fairly overwhelming amount of info there and, when I first approached it, I was pretty lost).
http://forum.tarothistory.com/index.php
Finally, a bit of a commitment which I haven't been able to find at a reasonable price (it's out of print) is "A History of Games Played With the Tarot Pack: The Game of Triumphs", which, from everything I've read, is a spectacular source of information on history and cultures interacting with tarot, though obviously it's more focused on the historical/game side of things than cartomancy.
Daphne, that's good to hear, I had been thinking that, with the basis in historical games which tend towards heavy stock (and with a small/skewed sample group to compare decks, having only recently gotten involved in tarot), thicker cards might be popular. The 400 GSM paper stock we're leaning towards is going to be slightly heavier than regular decks (we were recommended the 350 GSM as what most printers approach the company looking to print tarot cards on), but not exceptionally so, and we liked the idea of it having a bit more heft to it, though I'm not positive how 1/20mm will change things, other than the whole deck thickness.
On linen stock, we only got about a dozen samples to look at (from one deck), so I don't know if it varies based on a given run, but the cards we got, compared to a standard Bicycle deck, are slightly lighter indentations, at slightly greater intervals (so, less density). I'd never really thought about the sound of shuffling, though- for me, it's always been more of a tactile experience.