Tarot of the Thousand and One Nights

Scheherazade is the right patron for a tarot deck. She survives a thousand and one nights by knowing which story to tell next, which is close to what a spread asks of a reader. The archive's reviewer describes a window onto a magical world of adventure, poetry and eroticism, and Lo Scarabeo's production gives it the dense, ornamented look the house reserves for its literary titles. The framing deserves naming plainly. A European publisher rendering the Arabian Nights inherits the whole nineteenth-century apparatus of the exotic, and the deck reads as decorative Orientalism about as often as it reads as the source. Taken as an illustrated response to a specific book rather than a neutral tarot, it holds together. It suits readers drawn to literary decks, collectors of Lo Scarabeo's catalog, and anyone who wants a storytelling frame rather than a symbolic one. Readers who want the Marseille or Smith machinery under their hands should look elsewhere.