Hoi Polloi - any idea on the artist or where it came from?

The deck is almost a direct copy of the RWS, but there a couple things I wondered about. The magician's hands are reversed from the RWS, justice is 8, strength is 11, the fool is unnumbered and there are initials on the front of the chariot. These things are like the TdM decks.

I always figured this deck was just thrown together to sell alongside board games, without much thought behind it. In the instructions, it says -which is really laughable, but now I do wonder if it was made by someone who actually cared about tarot enough to want to change back a couple of things.

I don't have any facts to clear up your question, but I suspect you are correct. It was indeed made for some kind of game back in the day, but I think whomever they got to do the art knew a thing or two. So we are left with a fairly authentic tarot to use. It's a great deck.

It's definitely on my wish list and has been for some time, though at this time it would have to be a secondhand one (as if anyone would ever give one up!). There was mention of its history in a very old thread somewhere.

You bring up a great point. Especially in how the artist placed the justice and strength cards in the proper order. I'm a huge fan of this deck, and I love the additional pop the color scheme used gives. It makes it extremely friendly to use.

Was it printed somewhere in Europe? The inclusion of several TdM elements is interesting. The Magician's pose is reversed to roughly match Le Bataleur's: left hand with wand raised, right down. Most of the backgrounds are erased to bare white, just the bare minimum of visual elements to match the TdM without compromising the RWS visuals. The Magician has to have the flowers in the foreground or else he'd have no legs, but the trellises above him are gone so that it's as open as the Bataleur.

I'm not sure how aware the gen. pop. US was of TdM in the early 70s, but that these small details were sneaked in there suggests that someone was looking for similarities.

I love my copy, though I won't use it. Mine is nearly mint and I don't want it damaged. I found mine in a local antique shop for $6. It was originally $25, but I had won a $20 gift certificate there and so it wound up being $6 after sales tax. I got a hell of a deal, seeing as ones in my condition with the long purple box usually go for $75-100 base.

I don't know much about it other than it was one of the last, if not THE last, RWS clone made before USG started cracking down on their copyright in 73.

Now I should go through it and look at it again. I love the quasi-neon colours they used. It reminds me of Terry Gilliam's animations for Monty Python in a lot of ways.

Aeric said:

Was it printed somewhere in Europe? The inclusion of several TdM elements is interesting.

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Mine says printed in the USA, and an old archived thread has the box printed with "Graphics by Jason Peterson" although my box doesn't say that. Couldn't find out anything about that person though. The initials on the chariot say alpha omega

Darkmage said:

I love my copy, though I won't use it. Mine is nearly mint and I don't want it damaged.

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I felt the same way about mine, because it had sentimental value, so I bought another copy just to use. They show up on ebay for not too much, especially if you're not looking for perfect condition.

It's one of my only reading decks, been using it for years and I love it.
One of the things that makes me love it so much, apart from the candy pop colours and the groovy font is the fact that it seems to be a mix of RWS and TdM. One of my 'things' is that I have to have Justice at number VIII and Strength at number XI, they just don't work for me the other way around and I use number, suit and image to get the card meanings in a reading. I love the white space on the cards too, they're basic, not cluttered.

My copy is now battered, I had another and gave it away to a friend who really wanted one but if I ever see another copy on ebay that's not too expensive, I'd quite like to have a back up just in case I ever lost a card or something happened to my main deck.

I strongly suspect that the artist knew a bit about tarot otherwise he or she wouldn't have made the switch of Strength and Justice back to their original positions.

I checked Kaplan's Encyclopedia for an entry on the Hoi Polloi, hoping it might yield something of interest. Though it is given a page in Vol. 1, it's mostly just pictures of some of the cards, and a very brief note that mentions nothing about the artist or origin of the deck.

I could swear I have the box, or part of the box, from my Hoi Polloi somewhere, but I could be mis-remembering things. I have a near-pristine copy of the deck, but long ago I put it in a bag for easy access.

Yelell said:

Mine says printed in the USA, and an old archived thread has the box printed with "Graphics by Jason Peterson" although my box doesn't say that. Couldn't find out anything about that person though. The initials on the chariot say alpha omega

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The box for my deck also says "graphics by Jason Peterson"