Alan

The Alan Tarot is a traditional seventy-eight card deck credited to A. Orell, classic in structure and classic in imagery. The traditional tag is itself information: this is a deck that followed convention rather than argued with it, which in tarot is a real choice and not simply a default. Conventional decks are what keep the tradition legible between its reinventions. As a reading instrument that means full usability for anyone with standard fluency; the deck asks nothing unusual of a reader who already knows the structure, and it offers no new system, no extra card, no reframed suit. The plainness is the point. Leaving the cards to do the work is the oldest argument in the tradition's favour, and the decks that make it rarely get written about. It suits collectors of catalog obscurities, readers who like their instruments plain and their mysteries in the cards rather than about them, and provenance hunters. Readers who want a deck with an argument should look to the revisionists.