What Would You Like to See in a Books Index?

rwcarter

nicky said:
Ok, if this was mentioned before I apologize... how about if the books deals with tarot in on tarot ways... such as game playing or spell working.. like some additional ways to use your cards?

FWIW.. Astrology is no different than Kaballah or Numerology in that they are all separate systems... tarot just works well with them in some ways...that is why I mentioned it. They are all truly stand alone.

Generally, if the book is about tarot and _____ (fill in the blank) then there's a category for it, and if I have such a book in my collection, then it'll make it into the first iteration of the index. (BTW, there are categories for games and magic(k) since I have tarot books about those subjects in my collection.)

So a book that's only about Astrology won't be included, but a book that's about the connection between Tarot and Astrology (like Liz Hazel's Tarot Decoded) will be included under the Astrology category. Once the first iteration is done, and if there's interest, books on other subjects that may enhance one's study of tarot can be added.

nicky said:
anyway thanks for whatever you decide Rodney ...this will truly be a labor ...of love hopefully

Labor is definitely an apt word for it. I'm sure that while I'm in the process of giving birth to the index, I'm going to be cursing up a storm (but I guess I'll be cursing at myself since I volunteered....

), but once the birth is complete, I'll be happy.

Rodney

rwcarter

thorhammer said:
ETA: Also, if possible, it might be helpful to include what deck/s is/are used to illustrate, eg. Robin Wood for the Tarot Shadow Work by Christine Jette. But not if it's too much trouble.

So, I've gotten started with this and ran into a serious hurdle. It's easy when one or more decks are used throughout a book to illustrate every card. Those are a no-brainer to include. I've run across a couple of books where only the Major Arcana is illustrated. I indicated that the particular deck was used to illustrate that particular book (but in looking back I didn't note that only the Majors were illustrated, and I'm on my second of 5 shelves of books and I'm not going back through to find that info).

I just came to Pollack's Complete Illustrated Guide to Tarot, which has illustrations from 50 different decks. I'm not including all 50 decks that are illustrated in this book! So, the illustrations field in the index will only contain books that at least contain illustrations of the entire Major Arcana, but preferably the entire deck. (A few may have slipped through, but oh well.) I'll have to decide if/how to notate that various decks are used to illustrate a particular book.

Rodney

Nevada

rwcarter said:
So, I've gotten started with this and ran into a serious hurdle. It's easy when one or more decks are used throughout a book to illustrate every card. Those are a no-brainer to include. I've run across a couple of books where only the Major Arcana is illustrated. I indicated that the particular deck was used to illustrate that particular book (but in looking back I didn't note that only the Majors were illustrated, and I'm on my second of 5 shelves of books and I'm not going back through to find that info).

I just came to Pollack's Complete Illustrated Guide to Tarot, which has illustrations from 50 different decks. I'm not including all 50 decks that are illustrated in this book! So, the illustrations field in the index will only contain books that at least contain illustrations of the entire Major Arcana, but preferably the entire deck. (A few may have slipped through, but oh well.) I'll have to decide if/how to notate that various decks are used to illustrate a particular book.

Rodney

First, wow, how great that you're doing this.

I would suggest, in the case you mention, adding a designation of "various" for those books that have numerous decks as illustrations or some that you can't easily identify.

I'd also have two categories of deck-specific (rather than just Thoth- or TdM-specific) or non-deck-specific or general, and then if the book is deck-specific, which deck. I don't know if that computes.... Sorry, I can't think of another way to say it at the moment.

Also sorry I didn't see this before, so I'm late in even adding my suggestion:

Will there be a Jungian Psychology category? There are quite a few books, I'm finding, that are about Tarot and Jungian psychology. Three right off the top of my head:

Jung and Tarot by Sallie Nichols
Discovering Your Self Through the Tarot by Rose Gwain
Tarot and Individuation by Irene Gad

rwcarter

Nevada said:
I would suggest, in the case you mention, adding a designation of "various" for those books that have numerous decks as illustrations or some that you can't easily identify.

Great minds think alike. I had already decided to use "Various" as the designation for books that use multiple decks for illustrative purposes without using the entire deck for that purpose.

Nevada said:
I'd also have two categories of deck-specific (rather than just Thoth- or TdM-specific) or non-deck-specific or general, and then if the book is deck-specific, which deck. I don't know if that computes.... Sorry, I can't think of another way to say it at the moment.

I don't know if what I'm doing covers what you're talking about, but here's what I'm doing. If a book is packaged along with a deck (and therefore illustrated with that deck), I'm calling that a companion book and indicating in the Illustrated with column the deck that's illustrated in the book. For example, Tarot: Mirror of the Soul by Ziegler was packaged with a version of the Thoth, so it's listed as a Companion book. Arrien's The Tarot Handbook is listed under the "Meanings" category, but under the Illustrated with column, I've written in Thoth. That way I should be capturing both books about the Thoth and books that are illustrated with the Thoth. Is that what you were trying to get at?

Nevada said:
Will there be a Jungian Psychology category? There are quite a few books, I'm finding, that are about Tarot and Jungian psychology. Three right off the top of my head:

Jung and Tarot by Sallie Nichols
Discovering Your Self Through the Tarot by Rose Gwain
Tarot and Individuation by Irene Gad

I only have Gad's book (both versions actually), and I originally labeled it Kaballah. Tarot Psychology by Robert Wang is actually a companion book to the deck, so that's its primary category. I'd also listed Perfect Tarot Divination by Wang as a companion book. I don't know if I have any other books in my collection that aren't written by Wang that are Jungian-based. Looking again at Gad's book, I can see changing its category to Jungian.

And that brings up another interesting point - many books will fit into many categories. In this first past I'm only dealing with the primary category of a book. So if a book discusses 5 different subjects, I will only list it under its primary category, which has tended to be Meanings because most of those books primarily provide card meanings and also touch on things like astrology, kaballah, numerology, etc.

Thanks for your input Nevada!

Rodney

Nevada

rwcarter said:
I only have Gad's book (both versions actually), and I originally labeled it Kaballah. <snip> Looking again at Gad's book, I can see changing its category to Jungian.

She does get deep into Kabbalah and Alchemy, but the title of the book says it very well -- Individuation is a Jungian term. (Though I think he might've borrowed it from the Alchemists, not sure.) I mentioned the other two as well because I know there are threads here about them.

rwcarter said:
And that brings up another interesting point - many books will fit into many categories. In this first past I'm only dealing with the primary category of a book. So if a book discusses 5 different subjects, I will only list it under its primary category, which has tended to be Meanings because most of those books primarily provide card meanings and also touch on things like astrology, kaballah, numerology, etc.

It seems that you have a good plan. I'll be ever so grateful to have an index. Thank you, Rodney!

rwcarter

An update

The first iteration of the index may see the light of day as soon as tomorrow evening. I'm on stay-cation this week, and I've just trudged through my library of 300+ books between Sunday and this afternoon. Now I'm in the process of going through the books that are bundled with decks. I've been inconsistent about adding those to my Books spreadsheet.

I'm waiting for confirmation from the moderator, but the books index thread that I will start will be purely informational. Once it's fully populated, it will become a locked sticky Note at the top of this forum. Any comments, corrections or additions to the index should be made either in this thread or in a new comments thread that may be created. Any comments made in the index thread will most likely be moved to the appropriate thread.

I know there are errors and inconsistencies in some of my data. But it's a start.

Rodney

rwcarter

OK. Through a Herculean effort on my part, I've managed to go through my entire tarot book library and get all the information I can about the various books I have. That's a total of 423 books and 469 entries for the index. (Books that are illustrated with more than one deck require more than one entry so that I can sort by the deck used for illustration.)

In consultation with the moderator, this thread is going to be closed. I'm going to start a new thread for discussion about the index. This new thread will also be used for providing info on books that aren't already included in the index. (As you can see, I have a lot of books, but I know I don't have them all! :laugh:

)

Tonight's TV night for me, so I don't know if I'll actually get the index thread started and populated tonight or if it'll have to wait until tomorrow.

Rodney