78 card Jean Noblet Tarot by Jean-Claude Flornoy

Woo Hoo!

Doing a happy dance here - my deck has arrived! For those concerned about the packaging - it was well packaged, there was no way this deck could have been "injured" in transit.

I am impressed by the size of the deck (a nice size for small hands), the quality of the reproduction, and the intense coloring. I will have to take extra care with the square corners, but it is more than worth it!

I was also impressed with the box the cards came in - quality material, with a small explanation of the deck printed on each of the two sides of the deck - one side in English, one in French.

Off to play with my cards!

Blessings,
Bonnie

I got my deck today, and am very very happy. The size is so perfect, as is the finish (not too shiny, not too dry, shuffles smoothly, and does not catch glare from light reflecting off of it).

The colors are deep, some are dark, but in the best possible way (ie the darker blue hue), the light blue is very muted and earthy, all of the colors look just right together, and I love the change in the green in this deck.

The accompanying booklet is packed with information, which makes this a perfect deck for my beginner friend who is new to TdM. Very nice work there.

I love this deck, it is my new favorite and shall be the most used deck I own. There is so much more to this deck than the few things I've mentioned, no way can I do justice to it with my words though, so I will stop here.

Roxanne, thank you so much and also for the personal touch you added in the package. (I got a bonus card with a note on the back from Roxanne, I think it is Le Pape from the Dodal, and it is very cool!)

I am definitely getting more than one, and will be getting at least one as a gift for a friend. And maybe one for my mother in law.

Happy Happy Joy Joy! The Noblet arrived for me on June 30. Superb execution and quality for the entire package: sharp clarity of the images, deep and precise colors, sturdy yet flexible card stock, non-stick coating, and an excellent insightful booklet.

Truly one of the top and signficant decks of the year, and for the ages! Thanks to all involved in this wonderful deck production!

Strange2 said:

... non-stick coating ...

Click to expand...

Sounds like a frying pan!

The more I handle this deck, the more it occurs to me: of the Marseille-type decks I have or have seen, this is the one that feels to me like it might have come straight from the print shop! The reproductions, like the Heron Conver, which show the age of the cards and all, are lovely but I still feel like they're a modern reprint. But other than the slick finish on this one, it feels authentic. It feels like what they must have looked like when they were new.

Does that make sense? Like I had hopped in a time machine back to 1650 or whenever, popped in to see my old buddy Jean and he sold me a copy of his deck straight off the table.

My Minchiate Fiorentine has the same feel, and the Vandenborre/Flamand does too, a little.

Yves le Marseillais

Compare this 3 sources:

On hand stenciled 22 Majors, measures are:
From side to side: 94.5 X 59 mm
From black line to black line:90 X 54.5 mm

On 78 cards new version, measures are:
From side to side: 94 X 61 mm
From black line to black line:91.5 X 55 mm

My first conclusion is that:

The 78 cards brand new edition is more faithful regarding original Jean Noblet deck from B.N.F (Bibliothèque Nationale française).

After this (no, in fact I am lying I firstly looked to colors . ), I feel colors and for this no doubt that a craftsman work is uncomparable:
My second conclusion is that:

I definitly vote for my 22 Majors handmade deck.

Last pain for my eyes, I got my "loupe" (magnifying glass). Zoom 11 x.
And of course I voted again for my 22 Majors. A pure pleasure, to see the material of paint, so red, so blue, so yellow ect...

But back to more reasonnable distance :This 78 cards version is really great because it was necessary to organise this rebirth, this travel through Time for this so Modern design deck. An original man this Sieur Noblet !!!

Click to expand...

JC Flornoy writes:
With respect to dimensions: Depaulis furnishes an average card (black line to black line) dimension, as the originals (whose blackline "frame" is extremely fine) vary more or less 0,7 mm in either direction, depending. For the new edition it was necessary to establish a constant dimension, the same for all the cards. I ordered a new, and far better (at last) set of ecktachromes from the BN, and refined the dimensions accordingly. This gives an outer black-line measurement of 54,5 mm by 91,5mm. So, the new deck is indeed closer to the original's proportions. For the exact card-size of the new deck, I had wanted a less-wide outer border (as has the original), but printing processes couldn't allow less than a 3mm wide border. And I did try to squeak under that requirement more than once - to no avail.

The hand-stencilled cards had their origin in a series of large paintings of Noblet majors, begun in 1998 from projections of the 8 very bad ecktas made for Depaulis' book. To have the rest (the images the BN furnishes now are of much better quality) I had to wait a year (a commission had to meet, decide, allow....). Once all the trumps were projected and painted, I decided to move on to a "real-size" paper edition. What I hadn't noticed when doing the big (125cm x 83cm ) trumps was that the projector's lens slightly distorted the images. On that scale, this anomaly went unnoticed. To retrieve the black line for the paper edition (not being computerized at the time) I had the paintings scanned by a huge German machine (1m20 x 3m) which used 14 cameras mounted on a rail. These images conserved the distortions (mostly "stretching" towards the outer limits of the images), and in addition, none of the paintings had exactly the same blackline frame size. This of course caused difficulties when it came to cutting the paper edition, but with micro-editions hand-work can compensate for many variables. The artisanal deck lacks, in general, 2 mm in width.

For the new edition, all the images were corrected, frames re-done, lettering made to correspond with the originals (it was then that Eortune was discovered!), and more black lines hidden in the dark colors discovered in the course of several more trips to the BN. There, too, certain dark-color changes were decided upon.

So, yes, the new deck is closer to the original. And of course (or at least it does seem inevitable) gouaches will always surpass flat modern unified-tint industrial printing colors. What is reassuring is that, really, while not being comparable to gouaches, the industry result has not let us down. A future edition will refine and repair many factors visible (hopefully) only to myself. Robert seems to have the same sentiment with respect to his box. That seems to come with the territory.

At the outset for this deck I had planned on very small 3mm rounded corners. However, the card stock is 410 g. and the technicians at the printer's said they were unable to make such fine cuts on such heavy paper. It would have to be 4,5mm or square. The choice was easy, and Robert and I are glad of it.

I'm very pleased that the orders have started to arrive, at last. I hope the deck will furnish much food for thought, study, and pleasure.

Jean-Claude Flornoy

I like Lemperance even better than Eortune

Noblet background info

Jean-Claude:

Thank you for the background information on the process of bringing these decks to the public. For those of us who are not artists, we ahve no clue about the work involved. In the restoration of older decks, as you have done, there are many more things to take into consideration.

I feel as if I am learning a great deal here! Also, I feel that this deck will indeed fly off of the shelves!

Blessings,
Bonnie

oh, I forgot to mention the box.

It is lovely, and tasteful and dignified....I can see nothing wrong with it at all. And, a bonus for me, I finally realized that when one is talking of the Marseille deck, one does not use the "S" at the end, the way one might if talking about the city of Marseilles. I had no idea. Well done, Robert.

prudence said:

oh, I forgot to mention the box.

It is lovely, and tasteful and dignified....I can see nothing wrong with it at all. And, a bonus for me, I finally realized that when one is talking of the Marseille deck, one does not use the "S" at the end, the way one might if talking about the city of Marseilles. I had no idea. Well done, Robert.

Click to expand...

The thing is, it depends on where you are. Tarot or not, Marseille(s) is a city in the south of France. If you're an English speaker, you've been taught to put an s at the end. But for the French, its Marseille. Let us not lose energy wondering why - but as a born anglophone, the reason for the s has escaped me, and finally I saw no reason to hold on to it. But actually, both spellings risk to persist - forever. Other opinions, a real linguist perhaps, savant perspectives on what is actually a vaguely irritating fact: why would english speakers dare put an s on Marseille, especially when it doesn't change the pronounciation an iota?

prudence said:

oh, I forgot to mention the box.

It is lovely, and tasteful and dignified....I can see nothing wrong with it at all. And, a bonus for me, I finally realized that when one is talking of the Marseille deck, one does not use the "S" at the end, the way one might if talking about the city of Marseilles. I had no idea. Well done, Robert.

Click to expand...

Well thanks for that, there are a couple of things that I messed up, but overall, I think it's a nice box too. Of course, I want it to be PERFECT.

When we first started Tarotpedia... the nomenclature for the TdM got to be really challenging.

TdM is great... but do you use the French Tarot de Marseille? or the English Tarot of Marseilles? Especially, since there is a move even in the English world to spell it without the "s" on the end.

At the end, we decided to go with Marseille Tarot, which is also becoming popular. It seems to cover both.