...Sasha Fenton any day! BB, Stella
...No offense...her books are easy reads and full of common sence. They seem to have been reprinted in different editions. I got the feeling she went into the business at a time or place where someone felt safe to give their residence telephone numbers as business lines and had a room set up in her house.
I once bought a used book of hers that was illustrated with the Prediction Tarot--I decided that I didn't want that old book or deck, so exchanged/traded them last year.
But it's funny to me when I saw the Minchiate comments--I have the book by Williams and his survey method of period designs and discussions are fine with me. I kept the Renaissance Tarot and Minchiate books for reference and discarded my Sasha Fenton books.
But if your collection spans a lot of European decks, the updated Paul Huson's
"Mystical Origins of the Tarot" gives a fun and broad spectrum of 500 years of tarot history and line drawings to boot, especially in the Fool discussion. I noticed an online link that uses this as a reference.
...
Paul Huson, in his new book, The Mystical Origins of the Tarot, gives a useful listing of the meanings for each card according to the earliest works on cartomancy, from 1750, to A. E. Waite’s descriptions for his famous Rider deck in 1910. For the Fool card, almost all of these involve such concepts as “folly,” or “madness.” Only one shows anything like our modern view, and that is Waite, but not in his writing for the Rider deck (or at least not in the divinatory meanings he gives for the Rider). In his Manual of Cartomancy, published under the pseudonym “Grand Orient,” he describes the Fool as “...the consummation of everything, when that which began his initiation at zero attains the term of all numeration and existence. This card passes through all the numbered cards and is changed in each, as the natural man passes through worlds of lesser experience, worlds of successive attainment." (from 1889, quoted in Paul Huson's Mystical Origins of the Tarot, 2004).
http://www.themetaarts.com/pages/rachel1.html
Cerulean