View Full Version : Why the period in the titles of the major arcana
I had a client ask me what the period [full stop] was for in the title of every trump, and frankly I was/am stumped here. Any thoughts or references?
I'm not sure, but my guess would be that it was simply the convention in those days (circa 1910) to use periods at the end of titles or picture captions.
-- Lee
What about the four punctuation marks that are missing?
4 cards do not have the period at the end of their titles:
The High Priestess
The Hierophant
The King of Wands
The Queen of Pentacles
Lee is correct that it was a typographic convention to use
this form a compositional punctuation, people expected it.
Pamela Colman Smith may have felt it wasn't always needed,
or did A.Waite supply us with mysterious punctuation codes?
Cerulean
27-02-2005, 11:46
I am almost afraid it is the mundane cut-off or "running to the edges" copy available from 1909 in Sacred Texts. The borders run to the rightmost edge of the titles...I notice that "of" is pretty scrunched in Queen of Pentacles and part of the lettering is cut-off already.
I went to the Sacred Texts site to look. I remember in other situations that I was scrutinizing one or two print runs. Maybe I'm guillible, but I was told the offset is almost impossible to avoid...we just weren't charged for those copies that we weren't going to be able to use...
A careless chop of the printers paper-cutter and who knew that it would be scrutinized in posterity....but if others have interesting ideas, let me know.
Sigh,
Cerulean
If looking at a reliable reproduction, card by card,
you can see the artist's hand at work, even when
she got a little off centre or did a little squeezing.
Also notice that Pamela Colman Smith usually included a period following her initials. It's located beneath the "S" on most cards.