Tarot Cards and a Pack in The Magic Circle Museum, printed in The Magic Circular, The Magazine of The Magic Circle (Austin Spare Tarot Deck)

London: The Magic Circular, November, 1969. First Edition. Stapled wrappers. Quarto. Pages of this complete circular are numbered 21-36. This is the November 1969 issue of The Magazine of The Magic Circle. Illustrated in b&w. Very light corner wear. A near fine copy. NOTE: also included with this listing are the other 10 issues of The Magic Circular from 1969 (July and August are combined in one issue). A rare and important piece of Spare ephemera. This the first mention anywhere in print of the long lost Tarot deck created by Austin Osman Spare in 1905 or 1906. With the possible exception of some of Spare’s friends and associates, nobody knew the deck existed. In 1944 Spare entrusted the deck to the conjuror Herbert J. Collings, one of the founding members of The Magic Circle, a British organization dedicated to the history and promotion of conjuring and stage magic. In November of 1969, then curator of The Magic Circle Museum, Arthur Ivey (1891- 1975), published a short article within the organization’s internally distributed periodical The Magic Circular, briefly describing Spare’s deck in the context of a general history of playing cards. The article is the only source of information available regarding the deck’s provenance. Spare’s tarot deck remained entirely unknown outside of The Magic Circle, until 2016 when the book Lost Envoy: The Tarot Deck of Austin Osman Spare, was published. The article includes a two-page spread showing several of the Tarot cards in the deck.