Lost Envoy — The Tarot Deck of Austin Osman Spare

A new high quality paperback edition of Lost Envoy: the Tarot Deck Of Austin Osman Spare, reproducing in its entirety this seventy-nine-card, hand-painted tarot deck created c.1906 by the English mystic and artist, alongside contemporary essays and archival material.

Austin Spare’s lifelong 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 the twentieth century, and his interactions with some of the period’s artistic and political protagonists including Aleister Crowley, Arthur Ivey, Sylvia Pankhurst, and Pamela Colman Smith.

Magic Circle Museum curator and artist Jonathan Allen set about tracing the deck’s provenance, its place in the artist’s oeuvre, and within the wider histories of cartomancy, in so doing contributing an unexpected counter narrative to the history of popular Tarot in the early twentieth century. Lost Envoy reproduces Austin Spare’s tarot deck in its entirety, alongside written and visual contributions from Jonathan Allen, Phil Baker, John Choma, Helen Farley, Alan Moore, Mark Pilkington, Kevin O’Neill, Sally O’Reilly and Gavin Semple. This revised second edition contains a substantial amount of new material, including the discovery of a major, hitherto unknown, source of inspiration for Spare’s deck.