1JJ Swiss

The archive's review begins my first deck, bought at a Spencer Gifts, and that unglamorous sentence is major tarot history: the 1JJ Swiss, imported by Stuart Kaplan, is substantially the deck that launched the modern American tarot market, sold through mainstream retail when nothing else was, the founding stock of what became U.S. Games. Thousands of readers' first decks were this one, encountered at a mall between the lava lamps and the gag gifts. The deck itself is a Swiss Marseilles-family pattern, 1JJ for its Jupiter and Juno cards standing where the Pope and Papess usually preside, a Protestant-era substitution with its own long pedigree. The reviewer's later discomfort with it, absorbed from reading, mirrors the era's drift toward esoteric decks; the 1JJ stayed stubbornly a card game's deck that happened to tell fortunes. It suits historians of the American tarot boom, Marseilles-family collectors, and anyone whose nostalgia includes shopping-mall enlightenment. As origin stories go, tarot's American one smells like a Spencer Gifts, and the deck wears it proudly.