Anthony Burgess' Hand-drawn Tarot

_R_

The name of Anthony Burgess came up recently in a thread about a deck based on James Joyce's 'Ulysses'. Trawling through some French archives, I came across some images of his own hand-drawn Tarot deck, and found some more images on another site:

http://www.calames.abes.fr/plus/num/Calames-20156261464825518#1

http://www.pnreview.co.uk/cgi-bin/scribe?item_id=9483

Intriguingly, the article in the second link mentions *3* decks known to have been designed by Burgess.

Burgess' short story on the Tarot, "Chance Would Be A Fine Thing", was mentioned previously on this forum, as I recall.
 

gregory

How fascinating. Oddly enough two of those cards look faintly familiar - I wonder if they have ever been used as illustrations...

ETA did he do any minors, does it say (it's a restricted site for the article...)
 

Patrick Booker

Interesting - maybe I should have a look for the Burgess short story. The image of the Fool from the first link does remind me of Wirth's image, and I notice that the Hebrew correspondences seem to from French occultists rather than the Golden Dawn.

Patrick
 

_R_

I'm afraid I haven't read the rest of the article beyond the paywall, so I don't know whether he designed a complete deck or not. But it would seem that he designed 3 decks according to one article, now as to whether that means 78 cards or Majors Only, I have no idea.

As far as I can tell, the short story anthology has yet to be published, and the recording is no longer available online, which is a pity.

I note that Burgess also wrote an enthusiastic, detailed review of Michel Dummett's 'Game of Tarot', included in his book of journalism, "But do Blondes Prefer Gentlemen?"

“In 1949 I managed to get hold of a copy of Papus's The Tarot of the Bohemians, which exalts the cards as the 'absolute key to occult science', and, with its aid, turned myself into a fairly efficient Madame Sosostris of the charity bazaars. Michael Dummett now comes along to tell us that the Tarot is primarily for games, not cartomancy, and that there is nothing either venerable or mystical about it.”
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nisaba

He was a wonderful author though very much of his time - I had no idea about that, though. If a buy-able deck is revealed, I'll be investing.
 

BrightEye

I love the style of the artwork. If any buying info transpires, I'll definitely consider investing.
 

gregory

From Mary Greer's blog - based on the BBC listing.

Burgess wrote “Chance Would Be a Fine Thing” in the early 1960s but couldn’t find anyone willing to publish it. The story is about two middle-aged women and their ill-fated experiments with Tarot cards. Otherwise, you will have to wait for it to be published in 2013. Burgess appeared to have a deep interest in tarot, owning several decks and having designed one of his own. He is known to have read cards at a village fete in the 1950s disguised as ‘Professor Sosostris the famous clairvoyant’ (an obvious reference to T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Wasteland”). Read more about the story here. (Thanks to Fiona Blount.)
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I wonder if the printing ever happened. I can't FIND it :(
 

_R_

A quick glance through Amazon (both UK and US) as well as Worldcat turned up a bunch of recent reprints of Burgess' other work - but no new anthology as yet.

Quite likely publication date has been postponed or pushed back considerably.
 
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