Sunshine Challenge: Prompt #6

[lebateleur]

This is the time to share all of the things we have collected over the years showing our love for our favorite fandoms.

Picspam is fun.

Manga and novels

This is embarrassingly far from the complete collection.

Rollplaying

Ye Olde D&D Guides (or at least the ones that aren't in the bag of holding or living room), plus bonus Endless Quest and Investigator's Handbook. The comics to the left are mainly Ellis and Moore. Dice and figures not included.

A few selections from my collection of yellow- and blue-backed novels.

These particular books are volumes of Hakkenden. They are upwards of 50 of them, printed on mulberry paper, dating from the 1860s to 1870s.

It takes me so long to read a page from one of these things. SO LONG.

Omake: Tarot decks.

Being a photo of some, but not all, of the decks I read with these days.


これで以上です。

Comments

[enemytosleep]

Booksbooksbooks I want to smell those mulberry books! And I didn’t know you read tarot, I’ve always been casually interested in it. Do you ever post about it here?

[lebateleur]

Tarot is my longest running fascination. I've posted deck picspam here, but I do most of my writing about tarot reading longhand in notebooks. If you ever get the itch to join in this geekery, Aeclectic Tarot's introduction to card meanings is a great place to start. Sacred Texts has links to old school books by Papus, Waite, and Mathers, who invented the occult/fortunetelling tarot. Or if your library has them, Rachel Pollack's Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom and Cynthia Giles' The Tarot: History, Mystery, and Lore are both really good reads.

[enemytosleep]

I will keep you in mind if I have any discussion topics on this. I’ve got a wonderfully log back log of things to consume thanks to sunshine_challenge so it may be a while yet!

[pauraque]

Your roleplaying bookshelf looks a lot like my stepson's. He DMs for a D&D group at his school. :)

[lebateleur]

Oh, that's cool. :) Back when I was in school, they tried to shut that sort of thing down--this was back in the day of D&D/heavy metal/day care "satanism" scaremongering. Pretty cool that (most of) society has moved on from that foolishness...

[goodbyebird]

Dang that's a lot of D&D. Have you played through most/all of them? And what beautiful mulberry books!

I do have three tarot decks at home, but I've never had enough spare brain to actually dig into them so for now they're more pretty art cards than anything else. It's good some people actually make use of them hehe.

[lebateleur]

Thank you! As far as the D&D books go, we've played through about half the campaign books so far. The rest are queued for the future or for mining ideas. Which tarot decks do you have?

Also: I see you are a Community fan, and this is huge. Mind if I follow?

[meridian_rose]

Aesthetic bookcases :)

It didn't occur to me to include Tarot. I sold a couple of decks last year and kept only the ones I felt more connected to :) If you have the money Tarot deck buying can be an expensive if rewarding endeavour!

[lebateleur]

Thank you!

Which ones do you have (and which did you sell)? As you say, they're endlessly fun to collect. I'm somewhat disciplined (I think!) in that about one-fifth of my decks are curios, while I actually work with the remainder.

[meridian_rose]

It's a mix of Tarot and Oracle cards :)
Decks I have: Arthurian Tarot (Caitlin and John Matthews) ; Druid Oracle Deck (Philip Carr-Gomm) ; and a Goddess Oracle which I can't recall the author of right now.

Decks I sold: Gothic Tarot of Vampires (Lo Scarabeo) ; The Robin Wood Tarot ; Goddess Pack (Juni Parkhurst) The first 2 were gifts and I never connected with the decks, the last something I got from a Mind Body Spirit bookclub years back.

I purchased this year Wisdom of the Oracle by Colette Baron-Reid and took a dislike to it; it only ever gave me very negative readings so I haven't used it since though I put a fave card up on my noticeboard to attract the good vibes- it was one of the cards that drew me to the deck.
I downloaded the digital only Spirit Animal Oracle by Frédéric Calendini, which I use on my kindle and I'm very much in love with that :)

Plus I have a personal deck I made myself using the Creating Your Own Tarot Cards book by Nancy Garen; I did the whole process, one card per week and an extra per month for just over a year (I think I'd lack the patience now!) and then collected and printed a whole load of images including stock photos and popular culture along with craft stamps & ink and peel off stickers. I laminated the whole set of heavy duty collage cards and I did scan them all too. They're bulky but I make do with how I deal and spread them, and they're incredibly personal and I try not to 'overuse' them!

I'm not a packrat for them as other Tarot lovers are, but it still took soulsearching to sell those but I knew I wasn't going to use them so it was better someone who'd like them should have them :) If I had more cash I'm sure I'd collect more decks!

[lebateleur]

I never got the Matthews' Arthurian Tarot, which is odd because I have pretty much everything else either of them has ever written--including John Matthews' Sherlock Holmes Tarot, which is one of my curio decks. But at the time when that deck was available I had the choice between it and Courtney Davis' Celtic Tarot and opted for the latter.

It wouldn't happen to be the Running Press Goddess Oracle, would it? I have the cards only for that one and have always wondered what the companion book is like.

Lo Scarabeo decks are hit and miss with me, but I adore their Night Sun Tarot. I often hear it described as "masculine" and "aggressive," but I find it to be neither; rather, it's the best aspects of the Thoth deck without Crowley's aggressive definition of masculinity. I never connected with Robin Wood either, or the Aquarian Tarot, but I do keep that one around as a challenge deck, if that makes sense.

That is very cool--I started on a quasi-collage deck years ago but ran out of steam long before I finished it. I've toyed with the idea of making a deck ever since but just don't have the stamina (or the art skills) to get all the way through it.

I think I fall somewhere between minimalist and packrat--I've passed on plenty of decks but definitely have periods where I only want to read with Marseilles, or Golden Dawn-inspired, or experimental, so I need several around. And, as you say, if I had more money, I'd probably have more than I do now. ;)

[meridian_rose]

I honestly couldn't recall so I dug it out today to see and took some pics :)
In doing so I found the other animal oracle cards I kept which I'd forgot about; I have a larger book by Susie Green that I refer to more than the cards and accompanying book here. So it was a nice surprise to find I still had those!
The goddess cards are by Anna Franklin via Vegas, this one: https://www.amazon.com/Oracle-Goddess-Book-Card-Pack/dp/1843336308

click images for full sizes:





I've not seen the Courtney Davis one before but it looks broader in scope than the Arthurian Tarot and the images I saw online are nice :) There are so many lovely decks out there!

[lebateleur]

Those Frankin cards are beautiful! I really like the color palette, and that guidebook looks way more comprehensive than your typical Little White Book.

Here's the Goddess Pack I have:

The style and color combinations would not typically be my thing, but they really work for me here, and the 50 goddesses in the deck are a balanced mix from present day and ancient cultures.


There are no card backs in this deck; the goddess illustrations are on one side of the cards and what you'd expect to be the guidebook content is on the other. That's why I've always wondered what's in the separately published guidebook for this deck--I don't imagine it just rehashes the same content.

[meridian_rose]

Those are gorgeous! It's nice having at least an overview of the meaning on the back so you're not always scrabbling through the guidebook if you've got several cards in a reading.