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Lost Envoy: The Tarot Deck of Austin Osman Spare
In the Spring of 2013 a 79-card, hand-painted tarot deck created c.1906 by the mystic and artist Austin Osman Spare, was identified within the collections of The Magic Circle Museum in London.
Austin Spare’s life-long interest in cartomancy is well documented, yet very few of his own fortune-telling cards were thought to have survived. This compelling new example of the artist’s early work demonstrates his precocious involvement with the currents that shaped the British Occult Revival at the beginning of 20th century, and his interactions with some of the period’s lesser-known protagonists.
Magic Circle Museum curator and artist Jonathan Allen immediately recognised that Spare’s cards were not only art-historically significant, but also entirely unknown outside of The Magic Circle’s collections, and set about tracing the deck’s provenance, its place in the artist’s oeuvre and within the wider histories of cartomancy.
Lost Envoy reproduces Austin Spare’s tarot deck in its entirety for the first time, alongside new written and visual contributions from Jonathan Allen, Phil Baker, Helen Farley, Alan Moore, Kevin O’Neill, Sally O’Reilly and Gavin Semple.
The book is designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio, with a cover incorporating the vibrant back colours of Spare’s cards, a period binding common to many of the volumes found in The Magic Circle library and a gold deboss of the artist’s autographic ‘bird-head’ motif, as discovered within the deck itself. The numbered and debossed special edition contains several fold-out sections showing conspicuous alignment between cards.
Austin Spare’s life-long interest in cartomancy is well documented, yet very few of his own fortune-telling cards were thought to have survived. This compelling new example of the artist’s early work demonstrates his precocious involvement with the currents that shaped the British Occult Revival at the beginning of 20th century, and his interactions with some of the period’s lesser-known protagonists.
Magic Circle Museum curator and artist Jonathan Allen immediately recognised that Spare’s cards were not only art-historically significant, but also entirely unknown outside of The Magic Circle’s collections, and set about tracing the deck’s provenance, its place in the artist’s oeuvre and within the wider histories of cartomancy.
Lost Envoy reproduces Austin Spare’s tarot deck in its entirety for the first time, alongside new written and visual contributions from Jonathan Allen, Phil Baker, Helen Farley, Alan Moore, Kevin O’Neill, Sally O’Reilly and Gavin Semple.
The book is designed by Fraser Muggeridge studio, with a cover incorporating the vibrant back colours of Spare’s cards, a period binding common to many of the volumes found in The Magic Circle library and a gold deboss of the artist’s autographic ‘bird-head’ motif, as discovered within the deck itself. The numbered and debossed special edition contains several fold-out sections showing conspicuous alignment between cards.
336 pages, Hardcover
Published May 11, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
September 25, 2016
A superb presentation and examination of a rare and historically important discovery of a personal tarot deck created by Austin Osman Spare, one of the most unique esotericist and artist of the early 20th century. The volume is beautifully produced and bound, and features reproductions of each card, with detailed analysis of images, meanings, and unique marginal images/text that connect specific cards to each other. There are also insightful reflections by esoteric contributors such as Phil Baker and Alan Moore.
Highly recommended for those interested in Spare and Tarot!
Highly recommended for those interested in Spare and Tarot!
January 27, 2018
Fascinating set of essays on the tarot created by the 20 year old Spare in 1906, plus enlarged reproductions of the images themselves. The book beautifully designed book is a work of art in its own right.
January 12, 2025
An absolutely fascinating companion to Strange Attractor’s Spare biography, beautifully illustrated and full of incredibly important context and historical images relating to Spare’s idiosyncratic deck. I could have done without Moore at his most precious and the weird Pankhurst story, but the rest is absolutely wonderful even for a tarot naysayer like myself
June 12, 2024
Intriguing glimpse of the homebrew slipstream occultism of Austin Osman Spare via his syncretic cartomancy deck. Full review: https://fakegeekboy.wordpress.com/202...
August 6, 2025
A beautiful book, with great quality images and reproductions, it's of special merit the reproductions of AOS actual tarot cards, each of them reproduced with every detail possible. The articles, while some of them interesting, were more into hypotheses of why and how AOS constructed his deck
April 18, 2017
Beautiful presented but the topic is quite limited so it runs out of steam. Still, if you want to down the rabbit hole of Spare's deck, well have at 'er!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews