bogiesan
LOL. So true. It brings me many hours of mirth that supposed lovers of tarot decks still cannot - over 100 years on - bring out a copy of the deck as it was and as tarot users want it.
Ramble Mode --> ON.
Sorry to bump this but Le Fanu's comment was particularly relevant for me this week. The company I work for is preparing for our centennial celebration in 2016. As a long-term employee and photographer, I'll be playing a major role. We're diving into state and local historical records as well as the corporate archives (you remember that last scene in "Raiders of the Lost Arc?") and I'm facing similar issues: How do we reproduce letterpress books, silver halide photographs, color dye transparencies, color lithography, 16mm film, reel to reel audio tape and all of the ephemera of bygone eras while preserving the overwhelming yet equally intangible human-ness of these precious artifacts?
I have a large format, first edition hardcover of an Eden Gray. The illustrations on each verso page are about as pure and true to Smith's litho crayon drawings as I've ever seen or can imagine. Similarly, there must be early editions of Waite's PKT available for precision scanning. Then a skilled digital craftsman, not necessarily an artist, could assemble the overlays for CMYK printing or, using crosshatching and dot screening, recreate some of the earliest deck issues' colors by using Pantone inks custom blended to mimic ye olde lithography inks. Certainly that would have produced a far more satisfying pack of cards than what we ended up accepting. The loss of clarity and muddiness of the WS and Albano reissues, originals and W-PCS commemoratives appear to me to be the result of a cheap or careless photographic reproduction with some digital cleanup.
Of course, the cost to US Games to perform this act of repsect might have been ten to one hundred times what they invested in —the centennial issue. In publishing, however, the pre-production costs tend to be negligible compared to the post production costs of printing, packaging, promotion and shipping.
Ramble Mode --> OFF. Thanks, now.