why do cards need borders???

[Umbrae]

i guess what i am really asking is, besides title and description, are there additional reasons as to why tarot cards need borders?

My opinion is based on working in a photo processing lab in the 70’s and casual labor in various print shops's.

Borders make printing and cutting easier (thus – less expensive for the customer)

I even remember when photo processing changed, I think in the mid 70s or early 80s, from borders to no borders, I had a problem with that. There's a more classic feeling for me to my old photos with borders than to the more recent ones without, and maybe that's the reason. The newer ones without borders seem to be less "dressed up", less formal, less removed from the present, while the older ones with borders seem to be more formal -- even the candid snapshots -- and placed firmly in the past where they belong. A photo is yesterday, after all, not today...

When we were going to our second edition of the Pearls of Wisdom we tried to go borderless. We found, however, that we might have lost some of the image in cutting. So, we chose a narrow dark border to protect the image, but not distract from the art work.

 

[Basic Elements]

I lied. I forgot that I trimmed the Thoth. I did it to play with the geometry. But I will have to get a spare to leave intact.

I can't believe they haven't made a borderless Thoth for this very reason yet.

 

[SunChariot]

Some people prefer them. A lot of people trim the decks but a lot of people also prefer the borders and don't.

Personally, I prefer having the borders

Babs

 

[tmgrl2]

One of my favorite reading decks is still the Morgan Greer, borderless....I love it!

terri

 

[Morwenna]

(how about a completely new border.....! with cats.... teeny tiny cats..... excuse me; I just miss cats !)

You have no cats?! Horrors!
Me, I'm just waiting for the Cats Eye to be finished! Any word on that, anyone?

And yes, I have two cats. Or rather, they have us.

 

[Psy]

These kids nowadays... Anarkists, all of them!!!
Life need borders!!!!!!

(Sorry, just got carried away in the "old man" persona XD)

John
-ignore this post XD-

 

[WolfSpirit]

Some people prefer them. A lot of people trim the decks but a lot of people also prefer the borders and don't.

And some people trim decks just because they want to see what the deck looks like without borders, and because they love the process of trimming
I hate decks that have huge borders, especially if they are white. I find it even hard to think of those white spaces as borders - it is just a lot of nothing. Think of the Ananda and Lori Walls Erotica in that respect - lots of nothing that could have been used to show the artwork better !
On the other hand, I love the borders of the Hallowquest Arthurian that form an arched window to look through. At least, I like it in the old edition which has a black frame. I think the new edition has white (what's with all that white ??? It's just laziness I say )
I used to trim decks but I have not done so for a while now, probably because I am doing other handcrafts now so for now my decks are safe
Either way I cannot really get passionate about yes or no borders, it is not a make or break with me for decks. Although the Tarot of Transformation has hideous borders, that deck looks 100 % better without them, lol.

 

[nisaba]

These kids nowadays... Anarkists, all of them!!!
Life need borders!!!!!!

Life *does*, actually, need borders.

Twenty years ago I was young and foolish - so foolish that I actually lived and worked in Australia's largest and most unpleasant city, Sydney <vomits at the mere memory and is profoundly glad she's fallen in love with a town of 450 people where the nearest supermarket is 189 kms away>.

For a while I worked at the Macquarie Street end of town, which for people in the know is where the medical specialists and the higher-charging of the legal fraternity had their crusty, male-dominated, wood-panelled offices. Suffice it to say, about the only thing Macquarie Street has going for it, is its proximity to the Botanical Gardens, made even more pleasant in term breaks by the presence of students from the nearby Conservatorium of Music busking in the park and calling it outdoor rehearsals.

About the only way I could make it through the day was to adjourn to a certain Macquarie Street cafe somewhere between two and three in the afternoon. It was on the "ground floor" of the building under millions of tonnes of concrete, metal and medical expertise, and this level was actually a bit of a basement - the cafe had large picture-windows, and the pavement oed was at about hip-height. Over that was a clear view right into the park. And it was lovely, don't get me wrong, to walk through the park on soft grass instead of concrete and smell the mingled smells of diesel fumes and salt from the harbour, but it was actually far nicer to see that same view from inside the cafe, looking out through these huge windows with lovely turned-wood frames with a pattern of curliques on them. The window frames enhanced the view, taking it away from the madness that was my Sydney-based life at the time, giving it an element of remoteness and dignity and fairy-tale fantasy. They made the view, from less-unpleasant-than-the-rest-of-the-city to downright beautiful, and the mid-afternoon cup of coffee was just an excuse to go and sit there and look at the Botannical Gardens through those frames, a view you couldn't get from anywhere else.

Conversely, borders on cards do the reverse: just as the window-frames distanced and romanticised the real-world view, borders on cards creates a connecting corridor, and brings me closer to the images. I have a few borderless decks: Ellen Reed's deck, the Morgan-Greer and the Quantum, and of all of them I'm truly only comfortable with the Quantum - in the others the missing borders are a defect. Strangely, even given my preferences, I don't think the Quantum would be enhanced by borders - somehow, outer space or the interstitial spaces between sub-atomic particles are different to normal space and don't need that connection. However, the lack of borders is a part of the reason that I'm very, very super-careful handling the Quantum: I'd hate the edges to get damaged at all, even minutely, because without borders that damage or discolouration will encroach into the images.