Lo Scarabeo

I am looking into the history of modern Tarots.

Has anyone produced some account of the company Lo Scarabeo ?

Is there any complete list of their publications with dates ?

I have many of their decks, but there is almost nothing about the company in the literature with the decks.

Also I would like some information on the early publications of this company. I have many of these but a few are missing and I can't seem to find an exhaustive listing. The later decks are all easily available of course
but the early art decks are not so easy now to find.

Thanks for any help you can give,

Adam McLean

Have you written directly to Lo Scarabeo? They are very friendly and I imagine would be helpful. It's certainly an interesting topic. Are you planning an article or book? It would be great to see the results of your research.

I will take up your suggestion and write direct to them.

At the moment I am just researching modern tarots, with no real intention of publishing anything. I am just a curious sort of person and like to find out about things. Tarot cards are truly an amazing phenomenon. There must be 1500 or more Tarot designs produced since the 70's and the artform still seems unexhausted. I still get a little thrill when I discover an original deck. Every deck seems to recreate the tarot images afresh, and that is a great delight, even when the artwork is poor or badly conceived.

I wish Lo Scarabeo had not become fixated on their standard 120 by 70mm size. This works for some designs,
but not for those which rely on textures for their artistic effects. These really need a larger format. I was a bit disappointed with the Tarot of the Secret forest as the printing didn't seem to do the artwork justice. It is not just
a problem that Lo Scarabeo has, as the Fournier Labyrinth Tarot also disappoints, as the images are really too small for the original artwork. Other tarot designs, however, work well in their standard format.

I certainly concur with your comments about sizes and sizing of decks. The Crystal Tarot would be more than magnificent in Via or Voyager size. By the way, are you the Adam McLean who wrote a commentary on Goethe's "Fairy Tale"? If so, bravo. Goethe's symbolic imagism complements the Tarot in its journeying towards wholeness of head and heart, spirit and matter, contemplation and action.

Adam McLean said:

At the moment I am just researching modern tarots, with no real intention of publishing anything. I am just a curious sort of person and like to find out about things.

Click to expand...

I wrote "A Timeline of the Occult and Divinatory Tarot from 1750 to 1980" that's available at:
http://www.tarotpassages.com/mkgtimeline.htm

Corrections and updates are always appreciated as people are now using this to date their collections. Please send them to me.

I also would love to add mini-stories about the creations of the decks or books (before we lose this info) - see the story on Peter Balin and the Xultun Tarot.

The person to write to at Lo Scarabeo is:
Riccardo Minetti
Lo Scarabeo
Via Varese 15c
10152 Torino, Italia

Riccardo speaks/writes English.

Mary

Adam:

We had the good fortune to nab a bit of Mr. Minetti's time a while ago, and do an interview which we published on the Tarot Garden website, here:

http://www.tarotgarden.com/library/articles/lsinterview.html

We've also documented over 90 of Lo Scarabeo's decks in our database, and have a number of others here waiting to be entered. To see if anything we have posted so far is missing from your listing, you can use this link:

http://www.tarotgarden.com/database/dbsearchengine.php?view_publisher=lo+scarabeo&view_stockstatus=1

Hope this helps.

-- Jeannette
The Tarot Garden

Jeanette,

That is brilliant. There must be lots of parts of your web site which I have not yet visited. That is exactly the sort of information I need.

Hi Adam,
I guess, you're Adam McLean, who produces this fabulous and well done website about alchemy.and hermetical texts. Although neither alchemy nor hermetical texts are my favoured topics ... this is a good page, made with very much engagement.

When you're interested to watch horribly much Tarot cards from 6 centuries I would like to invite you to have a look at

http://trionfi.com

the link to "Tarot Museum" offers various ways to visit the pictures (not only Tarot, but also other playing cards, which btw. are more interesting, as commonly assumed) . The other major link leads to Tarot history (15th century) and there is a section,

http://trionfi.com/0/gg/

which deals in exhaustive manner with the Mantegna Tarot and also Ludovico Lazzarelli, both themes I remember to have seen at your page as specific topics.
When you ... - with your probably large insider-knowledge about alchemy and hermeticism - arrives at a specific comment to these articles, may it be simple critique, further information or anything else, we would like to hear about it.

Book Tarot Deck Finder thread....

This might help:

http://www.tarotforum.net/showthread.php?t=40126&highlight=tarot+deckfinder

Best regards,

Cerulean