The Encyclopedia of Tarot, Volume I

Stuart Kaplan's Encyclopedia of Tarot catalogues historical tarot decks card by card, including the Marseille printings and the Visconti-Sforza sets, built from Kaplan's own decades of acquiring and photographing surviving decks and manuscripts rather than from secondary description of them. That direct, image-by-image documentation of physical decks a reader can compare against the plates themselves is the real basis for its standing, not the fact that Kaplan's own company published it, a conflict this atlas names rather than ignores. It has not independently traced later scholarly correction of any specific dating claim it makes about an individual deck. Use it for the documented appearance and history of a specific historical tarot deck; a claim about a deck's symbolic meaning as opposed to its production history needs a separate source.