Cult of Tarot Forum

Some of the hottest topics of discussion I remember on AT were about the question: to trim or not to trim? Do we change the artist's vision when we change the way our deck looks, are we "allowed" to do that, and how does it impact our work with the deck - or the deck's working with us?

I'll give you my Art Historical and tarotist point of view on the topic.

There is a fundamental difference between readers who see a tarot deck as ritual or magical object, touched with satin gloves after elaborate rituals of cleansing the room, incantation and meditation - and those who see it just as a parcel of printed cards, held with a rubber band and thrown into the depths of a bag, to be replaced when worn out. Most of us come somewhere in this scala.

I respect all my tools, whether it's books, cards or incense, and I respect an artist's vision. But when I feel that additional "stuff" on a card face disturbs my work with it, then I remove it. Basically, all the decks I've allowed myself to trim were Lo Scarabeos, where I had the strong suspicion that the artists didn't have much of a say in the addition of a border or a whole "framework of frames".

When I get the feeling that a deck would benefit from viewing it without borders, I take out my scissors and trim, round the corners and/or edge it. That's especially true for decks where I feel the artwork has a dynamic character and the spreads look like storybooks - energy from one card entering into the next. Trimmed or borderless decks lend themselves well to "narrative" readings. (I have posted pictures of my trimmed decks often enough - Haindl, Cosmic and Fey have all benefited in my opinion from this ruthless operation, not to mention the Thoth! and the Lo Scarabeo Vacchetta changed so much without a very jarring border....But it's really a matter of personal preference).


Constellations Tarot - the border serves an important function in unifying the deck visually



Celestial Tarot - the borders are intrusive, and because they're so much brighter than the art work (but not neutral like white or gray would have been), they make the art work look darker, more confusing and smaller


In other cases, I feel that the artist has spent a lot of time and love on the borders, and I don't touch them. Robert Place decks need the cool white frames. His quite static, solemn art (even his moving figures look frozen) presents one picture after another, and it works very well. The Constellation Tarot has beautiful starry borders which connect the cards visually; in a reading, a whole starry sky opens up, and the eye wanders between the constellations. How I wish they'd done something similar to the Celestial! the sickly blue border really diminishes the art work.

In art, adding a passepartout turns a sketch into a presentable work of art. One of my teachers when I studied Fine Arts was immediately suspicious when he saw "too polished" presentations mounted on multiple, multi-colour passepartout frames. They add distance.

Oil paintings were traditionally mounted in impressive frames, often gilded and carved. Some tarot decks make use of this tradition, like the Touchstone or Mystical Tarot with their heavy frames.



Mystical Tarot - imitating a carved ornamental frame




Touchstone Tarot - a simply wooden frame with a name plate for each card for a museal look


Sketches, drawings (pencil, coloured pencils, pastels, ink), etchings and water colours were traditionally mounted on neutral coloured paper mounts (passepartouts) and if framed, very simply. They are sensitive to light and are often presented in museums in glass vitrines under felt protection.

There are decks that honour the "lighter" and simpler techniques by adding simple white borders that let the art work shine.

The Wild Unknown Tarot (ink drawings with water colour washes), the Blake Tarot (etchings), the Daniloff Tarot (water colours) all add white borders that are not intrusive and remind of the traditional way these techniques were presented.




The Wild Unknown Tarot - pen and ink drawings, simple white borders. You can see the frame hand-drawn by the artist and some lines "overstepping" the boundaries, supporting the impression that we're close to the original drawings of the artist - nothing was smoothed or cut off from her work




William Blake Tarot - etchings with ornamental borders inspired by book layouts designed by William Blake himself, including his handwriting




Daniloff Tarot - water colour in the style of Ottonian/Carolingian book illuminations, simple white borders that give the image space to "breathe". The images themselves are framed by a thin dark and then a golden line, like inserts of illuminations in such manuscripts where text and illumination belong together but are clearly separate.

Then there are the decks where the artists and/or publishers went against these age-old rules and overwhelmed the artwork with jarring colours or fonts, too-complex frame systems, too much text or simply too-dark colours. (You are totally welcome to disagree hotly with me!)



Spiral Tarot. I really hate what they did with the beautiful and evocative artwork. Too much purple, even for my purplish tastes. Purple is a very strong colour that influences all the colours around it - we'll talk about simultaneous contrast later, but here you can see how the border distorts the overall picture of a spread. The graduations of the border colour which work well in the Byzantine Tarot look de-stabilizing here. Let's say no more about the font. I hope the designer of this deck presentation is properly ashamed - I can't imagine why the artist agreed, and hope for a new edition with borders that let the art work shine.



Goddess Tarot. Beautiful, yes. Lovely colours, yes. But I confess I have a problem with the proportions of the border. It eats up so much card space. What a pity. It serves a purpose - it removes the goddesses, we're like in a shrine and can see the goddess through all kinds of barriers. But doesn't the tarot want to help us bring these goddesses into our lives? Compare this to the Etruscan where a similar colour is used to much better effect imho.

I didn't buy Spiral and Goddess deck in the end because of the borders. They're too distracting for me. Ymmv.



Vacchetta Tarot by Lo Scarabeo. Horror of all horrors. Who thought that choosing this olive-ish green would do any good to the deck? The multi-lingual borders have all but disappeared by now, and what a blessing that has been. When I trimmed this deck, it came alive for me. But the proportions are okay - at least the borders are relatively slender.



Here is my trimmed version:



And now for the poor Shapeshifter Tarot.


Lisa Hunt's artwork is beautifully done, gentle water colour over pencil drawings - with the lightest of touches. The dark blue is much too dominant and electric for my taste and distorts the balance of colours in her work. Most of Hunt's colour choices are lower-saturation, and the strong blue simply makes them look faded. I guess trimming would do the deck a world of good and make the images shine.



Some positive examples?



Shadowscapes Tarot. Lovely shimmering lavender borders, not to broad - yes, having more real estate for the detailed water colour paintings would have been wonderful, but the esthetic choice of the borders makes sense to me. Others have trimmed the borders but I think they work well. The border is of a medium brightness which doesn't overpower either the darker or the lighter focus points of the beautiful images. The low saturation doesn't throw the colours in the artwork off. Designers of the Shapeshifter, take note! This is how you choose a colour that shows off your deck instead of making it disappear visually.




Orbifold Tarot. The borders give information about the card, they're part of the completely abstract design.




Etruscan Tarot. The warm orange-brown background emphasizes the colour scheme of the cards and reminds me of clay, one of the materials the Etruscans used so well. In a reading, you get a warmly-coloured wall with single images, a bit like looking into an Etruscan tomb.


In my opinion, borders can affect the way we perceive the art work of a deck. And since I believe that most readers do react to the visual impact of a certain deck (otherwise we'd all read with post-it cards, inscribed with a scribbled "Hierophant" or "6/Cups", and nobody would buy more than one deck...), we have to take them into account.

Borders separate the images from each other and thus supports a reading style that moves from one card to the others. Let's call this the "movie stills method" as opposed to the "story board method" mentioned above where the images melt into each other. In practice, I guess most people use both styles. Borders can give important information but also irritate and even undermine the deck's artwork visually.

It's a matter of personal choice whether we prefer borderless decks, whether we trim and edge our decks, whether we can disregard borders or get really really irritated by them.

I'm a basically conservative person and prefer to see traditional borders as outlined above - oil paintings can deal with strong borders, water colours not so much. I'm also a rebel at heart and like to see artists doing interesting things with borders or just leaving them away. And the proportion between card image/artwork and the surrounding frames, borders and lettering must be preserved, otherwise the artwork's impact is diminished and it's more difficult to "climb into the card". And that's often a good method to get more answers.

You nailed it, Nemia.
I have nothing to add except another reason to trim can be wear. I left the borders on my first Kipper deck for years, there was no aesthetic reason to trim them until they they eventually became extremely worn and grubby. Trimming made it pleasant to use again, and a side benefit is that they now fit into a little ouija mint tin, which is slightly smaller than a standard Lenormand tin. (It's beginning to rust due to the humidity here, but I can most likely find another, or something I like just as well.)



Now I want to get a LS Vachetta and trim it. I have the Il Meneghello, but an inexpensive version I could riffle and overuse would be fun.

I think they usually have those mint tins in the Spirit stores for Halloween.

Thank you!
We don't have a Spirit store where I live, but of course they have a website, so I'll check in a few months.

Are you sure? They're those pop-up stores that fill up abandoned strip mall stores in October. I thought they were everywhere.

Yes, but I've never seen one in the town where I live. Maybe one of the neighboring cities. This is not a Halloween-friendly town at all. I don't attribute that to religious extremists so much as parents buying the hype about poisoned candy, razor blades in apples, etc.

I see kids out trick-or-treating long before dark, at about 4 PM. Then at sunset, even that stops and there are cops cruising around everywhere you look. People tend to stay in because of that, even the bars are near-empty. The only thing going on is a little event that the library has on their front lawn for preschoolers.

(The really odd thing is that any other night of the year, it's not unusual to see little kids up and running the streets at all kinds of late hours. I'm talking after midnight, not 9 or 10 PM.)

It was a big shock coming here from Salem, where the Halloween festivities go on all month and the tourists pour in like crazy. I didn't expect all that, but having been raised in a small town in Texas, I expected after-dark trick or treating and a carnival or two like we used to have. Our local Catholic Church used to put on a Halloween carnival every year!

So no, I don't expect a Spirit store to pop up here.

And that's dumb. If the city didn't keep fun stuff out, I think people would come here and spend money rather than going elsewhere to spend it!

ETA: I don't want to jack Nemia's thread, so back to debordering!

The best trimming project I ever did was without a doubt the Lo Scarabeo Tarot.

Some years ago, Lo Scarabeo published a deck for their 20th anniversary that aimed to unite RWS, Thoth and Marseille motifs. The concept was by Mark McElroy, the art by Anna Lazzarini, a competent commercial watercolour artist. Some of the cards were great, others suffered from the "women have to be young, cute, white and sexy" syndrome.

But who ever thought it was a good idea to slap a generic knotwork border on a definitely non-Celtic deck? in a weird non-colour? The images themselves were dwarfed by the borders.




Sorry for the bad quality pics btw.

Can you imagine the fun I had?



The moment those ugly borders came off, the deck came alive.


These borders were much too big for the small images, and the colour scheme didn't fit at all.



It was such fun to see the deck free from those horrible borders.


The comic book style of the art made much more sense without borders, the cards connect much better. For this deck, you'd need no information which card is in front of you - each card SHOUTS its bearings. I kept the upper border with the card information nevertheless.



And the biggest bonus point of all?


I took a little tin box (I always keep tin boxes), painted it, cut out a motif from the cardboard box, added some highlights with diamond glue, and the little deck had a wonderful new home!


It turned into one of the decks I like to carry around. In spite of its tendency to over-boob, I like it.

Somewhere on AT, even Mark McElroy himself liked it

I generally prefer borders on my decks, as they provide a unifying structure and cohesiveness to the cards (sorry, I don't know how to express it more clearly!). A pack of trimmed cards often look like a bunch of disparate, unconnected images to me.

And titles are important too. We obviously know which card is which in a trimmed deck (well, hopefully), but words have power too and those titles (especially traditional ones) remind me that the card is more than just that image but a representation of all that word can mean.

If you have digital images of your decks then it easy to have both. With a program like the orphalese tarot you can have both alternatives and use the one that suits the occasion for computer readings.