How old can you go? WS relic

bogiesan

This is delightful: a Waite-Smith deck, battered and bashed, stained and scratched, handled and shuffled so often the sides of the cards have actually eroded away.

http://mycuriouscabinet.wordpress.com/2013/02/16/a-rider-waite-relic/

The author, Le Fanu, writes:

> It is something of a fantasy among certain tarotists to want to use ancient, wizened decks, something which drives them to extreme measures, artifically ageing their decks, scraping them along the edges of tables, scuffing them, sanding them, subjecting them to merciless batterings, maybe (who knows) burying them in the garden for a few weeks before exhuming them. All perhaps to give their decks authority, to give them – as readers – authority (“now here’s someone who has been reading for years”). <

>> About Le Fanu
Tarot collector in a far off land; loves ghost stories, magick, tarot, wistfulness, spookiness, Victorian spiritism, ectoplasm... <<

Sorry if this has already been posted; cursory search revealed nothing.
 

Carla

You know, LeFanu is a regular around here. Maybe he'll spot this thread. :)
 

re-pete-a

If the deck is the same thickness in height , then it hasn't been used all that much.

I have a deck that got damp from being on a boat...The cards have become concave. The plastic face of the cards being plastic has not swelled while the cardboard of the cards has swelled expanding the paper over the plastic. Causing the cards to stack twice as high and giving them a concave shape.

Very awkard to shuffle , twice the stacked height ,and when on a table they're arched up and tend to spin.

Perhaps there's a trick awaiting to give the cards a life of their own. The wow factor would allow me to charge tripple my fee..... making me very rich......$$$$$...How much is tripple nothing??
 

Inconnu

Much fun. Thanks for posting this.
 

Le Fanu

You know, LeFanu is a regular around here. Maybe he'll spot this thread. :)
Gosh yes. I love my putrefying RWS deck :)

And further to re-pete-a's comment. Yes, this one is also abnormally high for a RWS deck. Stocked thick with grime.
 

re-pete-a

Gosh yes. I love my putrefying RWS deck :)

And further to re-pete-a's comment. Yes, this one is also abnormally high for a RWS deck. Stocked thick with grime.

Me ol' gran showed me a trick to help the cards become re useable...She put them into a bag which had baby talc inside... Then she shook and flipped the cards inside that bag.

When they came out they smelt very pretty and were as slippery as me uncle Tom the gambler and used car salesman...Well, perhaps not that slippery, but almost.
 

Padma

I find it immensely amusing that Le Fanu has become a distant, mysterious, magical and quoted oracle living in a spooky place. :) The man has become the myth! :laugh:
 

danieljuk

I find it immensely amusing that Le Fanu has become a distant, mysterious, magical and quoted oracle living in a spooky place. :) The man has become the myth! :laugh:

I totally see him as that! :D
with a house full of every deck of cards ever! :)
 

firefrost

Wow, Leffy - a legend in your own lifetime! :D

(and rightly so!) :)
 

BSwett

Wow! I super enjoyed this blog post! It takes me back to San Jose, Costa Rica, probably around the year 1986. An old bohemian friend of my mom, a theatre man who wrote the most beautiful songs on his tattered guitar, who looked just like the Marseille hermit only in jeans a shirt and a vest. He always carried a tarot in his back pocket. An old hand drawn deck which was so worn, you had to trust his eyes cause some of the images had completely faded and only he knew if we were looking at 'Los enamorados' or 'el diablo'.
Over a beer in a little socialist bar in the outskirts of the university campus he pulled it out wrapped up with a rubber band, and read my cards for the first time ('throw' the cards, we say in Spanish -tirar las cartas-). I had never really seen the tarot before, but after my reading, and a short journey through the major arcana I was hooked for life...

Old worn decks are something else....

Awesome find Le Fanu!