Catharina

Catharina's deck enters the record as an online-only majors set from the web's first tarot flowering: twenty-two cards published digitally under a single name, the era when personal websites made everyone a potential deck-publisher and the screen was the only press required. Online-only decks of that generation are the tradition's most fragile stratum; servers lapse, hosts fold, and works that never touched paper survive only in archives like the one this catalog descends from. That fragility is the note's real subject. The catalog's preservation instinct, every deck a paper trail, meets its limit case in decks that never had paper, and recording them is conservation of the most literal kind. It suits historians of tarot's early internet, digital-ephemera collectors, and anyone moved by works that exist now mainly as descriptions. The lesson generalizes uncomfortably well: publication is not preservation, and the catalog shelves both kinds of ghosts.