Is this a vintage B&W University Books RWS?

RWS scholars – please help me identify this rarity found at an estate sale.

I don’t know what to make of this old B&W deck. It appears to be many decades old, housed in a tuck box with a 2 Swords card pasted on one side, but otherwise nothing by which to identify it. Because of details on the card titles, thickness of the bricks in The Sun, shading on the face of 9P, direction of the ‘sock puppet’ figure in the clouds in The Lovers, etc. this deck appears to have started off as / was based on / came before (???) the University Books edition (not Albano, U.K. Rider or Bert Bakker)

In fact, to my eyes, these cards are the UB line-art BEFORE colour was added! Please see the attachments to compare the tunic on The Fool, the feather in The Sun & Death, the garden in Ace P, the wand in Ace W, the mountains in Death, and virtually everything in The Lovers.

If it was simply a greyscale copy, dark colours would have come out as shades of grey – not white.
If it was a B&W copy, the dark colours would have come out black – definitely not white.
Additionally, the gray shading in UB cards has been preserved – see the sky in the Aces & Death and all titles.

The 9P confuses me the most. The garden, mountains & trees are the B&W line-art, but there is grey shading on her dress (not seen in line-art in DeL 'Key To the Tarot' or Eden Grey's books - but definitely seen in UB editions). And there are white blotches on her dress - where the red flowers/venus sign will later be added by University Books!

Images are the same UB size; card is 5mm longer and 5mm wider; card stock is thinner, the full deck standing approx ¾ as high as a UB deck (is this because the pink ankh backing sheet hadn’t been glued on yet? Both sides share the same light lamination as UB.

I’m not sure that the colours could be removed so efficiently even these days – but I judge this deck to be many decades old...
Please ask for more scans if it will help to identify this mysterious deck.
What is this treasure?

The lettering of the titles looks to be slightly thicker in most of the B & W cards. The shading on the 9 of Pentacles definitely looks like the UB. It's clearly a B & W that hasn't been colored, not a copy, as seen by the empty circles on the Fool's garment and the flowers on the 9 of Pentacles' dress. Maybe a test run or something? Nice find.

I have a slightly similar one - the Thoth Hermes Taro Cards from BC. Some of the cards are oddly blotchily pink, and they have meanings as well.

http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=251549

Also one where the ink used for each suit is colour coded....

Yours sounds fascinating.

I LOVE it. It's definitely not just a greyscale copy! It's interesting that it comes from a tuck box. As you rightly mentioned, the UB editions are thought to be the first use of the tuck box so there is definitely a benchmark for consideration. Could you scan the other sides of the box and the card reverse?

More scans.

Here's the back of the tuck box and the card back as requested.
Nothing much to see here (luckily the stain didn't penetrate through to the inside of the box).

Now to the 8 Swords.
I'm using Bert Bakker as pure PCS line art.
The B&W UB deck - has had grey added all over the place - already making it more sinister and despondent.
Whilst adding the shading, the UB artist took the liberty of closing the toe on her left shoe!
And, as expected, the shoe is closed in the UB colored edition too.

The shoe is open in Rider blue boxes/USG's yellow boxes.
But just to make my head explode, I notice that Frankie Albano also closed her shoe!

Oh no! Surely this B&W deck isn't the break-away common ancestor of University Books AND Frankie Albano....

Rocks in my head....

Of course! The rocks on the left of the 2S.
Devotees have often wondered why the UB artist added one more rock to the pile.

PCS rocks small, B&W & coloured UB deck extra rock, and Albano (&Rider/USG) rocks small.

Well, it's now confirmed (in my mind, anyway).
As Abrac suggests, this is a University Books B&W test run.

Oh my goodness, what a treasure.

hello guys

I think RichardG's BW-UB deck is a sort of "lost child" of the UB deck. I found a similar BW P9 image in the later UB PKT (1966). Perhaps they intended a "color it yourself" pack, like a BOTA one?

UB artwork for sure - but UB manufactured....?

Roppo's suggestion is an excellent one - but as the cards are laminated, pencil would not take to the card and ink would sit on top of the lamination and smudge when dry. So I don't think that this particular deck was designed for self-coloring.

But what a relief to see Madame 9P's blotted dress in the UB PKT (1966).

I would like to believe that this B&W deck was manufactured by University Books way back when...
But sadly, I suppose ANY sufficiently motivated card manufacturer could have produced this deck using images lifted out of UB's PKT.

At the end of the day, regardless of who was responsible for manufacturing this B&W deck, why haven't we all seen more of them...?
I hope that somebody else with a copy of this B&W deck will soon surface - and provide all the answers.

The more I look at these the more I think the B & W cards could have been copied from the book.

http://s31.postimg.org/ddb3daisb/9_Pents.jpg

In the book and color card images, the lines of Pamela's monogram are fairly thin but in the B & W card they're more thick. And the lines of the tree tops are thin in the color card but thicker in the book image. The trees in the B & W card also have thicker lines like they were copied from the book. Overall the B & W card looks closer to the book image but a little muddier, which could be from the copying process.

It could be one of a kind.

Fascinating. I need to find that particular book

EDITED: I checked some UB copies on hand. The image is the same in the 1966 edition as well as the "1959 (B)" version. The first versions of University Books' PKTTs ("1959 (A)": technically printed in 1960 but known as the 1959 copies) came in color without ads; and somewhere between 1959 and 1962 they stopped printing their PKTTs in color and switched to grayscale (shaded B&W) and did that all of the way through their 1966 printings. The main difference seems to be in the page count and the number of and exact ads appearing in the back of each book.

So, as all of that relates to THIS deck . . . This deck would seem to appear after 1959 (see caveat below), but it is unknowable whether it was 1960, 1962, 1966, or some other time (after).

Now, that said . . . it is not impossible that this might well be a proof deck but that would be a hard sell to make as the first runs of the UB PKTTs were printed in full color and issued with a deck that came in the red box: and we also have at least one known "review copy" of deck and book from early 1960 when UB was in NYC.

This definitely looks like a professionally made one-off BUT that only increases its rarity and value (IMHO).

NOTE: The terms for UB's PKTTs are of my own creation. There appear to be five known variations before UB was bought by a major publisher. I hope this helps.

Abrac said:

The more I look at these the more I think the B & W cards could have been copied from the book.

http://s31.postimg.org/ddb3daisb/9_Pents.jpg

In the book and color card images, the lines of Pamela's monogram are fairly thin but in the B & W card they're more thick. And the lines of the tree tops are thin in the color card but thicker in the book image. The trees in the B & W card also have thicker lines like they were copied from the book. Overall the B & W card looks closer to the book image but a little muddier, which could be from the copying process.

It could be one of a kind.

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