One more hand shoots up for Sharman-Burke!
I'd like to add my vote to those that 78thFool and CreativeFire have already cast for Juliet Sharman-Burke's Beginner's Guide to Tarot, whose back cover reaches out and wraps around a deck of cards illustrated by Giovanni Caselli—there's a thread somewhere devoted to the curiousness of the packaging, which requires that you cut off a kind of "hanging chad" from the back of the book after you've liberated the deck, but be reassured: A few snips of the scissors and all ends well (unlike some other incidents with hanging chads).
What I like most about the book is S-B's approach to teaching the Tarot: She starts off with the Minors, and when you've finished studying a bit about each card in one suit, let's say, Cups, she has you practice a 5-card Horseshoe with all the Cups alone (much to my amazement, I got a remarkably accurate reading when I tried this!). Then, when you've done the same thing with each of the four suits separately, she has you use all the Minors (and only the Minors) in a reading (dealing with "everyday matters") with the Celtic Cross spread. Similarly, when you're finished learning something about all the Majors, you do a 7-card, Majors-only Star spread, and finally you try out the first spread you learned, the 5-card Horseshoe, but this time you're using all the cards in the deck.
The cards are freely adapted from the RWS standard and read like a dream. I thought at first that they might be a bit too comic-booky for my own taste (the set was a gift), and perhaps I was right, but I'm just ignoring the frantically blinking signals my aesthetic judgment is sending forth and instead responding to the cards' clarity, their honesty—and sometimes their humor: Take a look at the Knight of Swords!
And on the plus side for newbies like me, Caselli relates all the cards of the same suit to one another with his use of color and symbol. So, for example, all the Pentacles feature the colors of the earth, while Cups are a watery blue and lush mauve, Wands all dry yellow and fiery red, Swords a steel grey. And depending on what suit you're in, you're bound to find a mouse, rabbit, salamander, butterfly or fish poking about and sending signals about the card's meaning.
This is the most accessible Tarot book+card set I know of (and how I wish I had known of it long ago!). For those newbies who might look at other beginner books and feel overwhelmed at the prospect of (apparently) having to swallow a cookbook-sized volume of meanings for 78 (apparently) inscrutable cards all in one mental gulp, S-B nicely breaks down the process into very manageable—even delectable—portions in one small book, and throws in a beautiful, honest deck to sweeten the deal.
A beginner really can't go wrong with this one.
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