Javanese Folktales

Adam McLean, the publisher who rescued the Colquhoun for this catalog, issued Andhika Wijaya's Javanese Folktales Tarot in 2009: twenty-two majors carrying Indonesian and Javanese story tradition, part of McLean's remarkable art-tarot editions that documented deck-making's global edges in small careful printings. The pairing matters both ways; Wijaya's folktale majors got scholarly publication, and McLean's series got Southeast Asian representation its archive otherwise lacked. Javanese tradition brings its own shadow-theater sensibility to the trumps, wayang's stylized figures and moral cosmology being natural arcana material, stories that already run on archetype and fate. Majors-only suits the folktale anthology form as it does the fiabe's. It suits collectors of McLean's editions, Indonesian and Southeast Asian culture readers, folktale-deck completists mapping the world's story-shelves, and students of how the trumps translate across cosmologies. The deck's small edition makes it quarry; McLean's list always was a collector's syllabus.