Moderated by: tarotcol |
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hobbit Member
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For what it's worth given the visible activity level hereabouts, I will use this thread to update the tarot community on the status of my mom, Barbara G. Walker, who authored the "Barbara Walker Tarot Deck" as well as the book "Secrets of the Tarot: Origins, History, and Symbolism". With her very rudimentary computer skills, she never had the desire to join any online forums or the like, and I didn't see any need to put any of her life online until recently as her health has begun to decline. This year she's 92, and would be absolutely fine if it wasn't for creeping neuropathy that's affected one leg, slowly, from the right foot working upward. This has been the expected disaster as far as mobility, and a corresponding progressive feeling of becoming helpless, but we're doing what we can to keep quality of life decently high. Her brain still works as well as you'd expect from someone that age, i.e. the usual sorts of putting something down and forgetting within 30 seconds where it went (like we all do sometimes!), but that's relatively minor. Other than the mobility issues, she's been living in a happily independent way at a nice retirement facility in Florida. Except for a year off during covid peaks, I've been down there every December holiday season to hang out. Her accomplishments are not just within the realm of tarot, of course. I have started a little mini-website about her and her other works, mostly hosting her writings about spirituality, feminism, religion studies, and flat-out rants about the sorry state of patriarchy. The site is at . http://bgw.works/ via a simple Amazon S3 bucket-as-a-website setup. Some of you may find the non-tarot items there amusing to read. _H* |
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hobbit Member
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So here's the big problem. Besides her own deck and book, Barbara has a fairly large collection of other decks. Which will sooner or later need to move on to other homes. Over the years she has managed to sell off a few of them in a spotty fashion here and there, but not recently. We had a go at me trying to broker them on Amazon, but that was kind of a flop, and these days I am loath to help line Amazon's greedy pockets. I personally don't do ebay or paypal and have very little desire to get into that sort of risk profile. Nonetheless, I am looking for an acceptable way that I could beneficially pass this collection on to the enthusiast community. By "beneficially" I don't mean rake in any fat profits; my expectations would be in the pennies-on-the-dollar range at best. But she says that some of the decks are quite valuable in the collector market, so it doesn't seem reasonable to just give everything away. And the last thing I want to do is throw any of this away, with such visible demand among this community in general. I have been pointed at outfits like Tarot Garden to look into, which may be options, but will entertain other notional processes to get the job done with reasonably modest work-factor on my end. Heck, there might even be local-ish used book/game stores that are already set up for sales and shipping, be it online and/or brick-n-mortar. I will therefore entertain serious suggestions/inquiries on this, I suppose as followups on this thread. Suggestions on what other community sites to join are also welcome. I know that Aeclectic is closed to new memberships but have attempted to contact Kate via site form-mail anyway. Mom always used Aeclectic as her go-to site for lists of what decks exist, as it's pretty clearly still the leading aggregation site for that. I have copies of various computerized documents that Mom produced which are long lists of deck names, but I don't know if it reflects her *actual* collection or just what exists in the world. I am trying to get that info from her, but she's been away from the computer for a week or two and does not presently have access to it. Mostly, she was keeping careful *paper* records, two very fat looseleaf binders with a clear-pouch page for each deck, with printed details and even clipped-out card images, all carefully pasted in and alphabetized. Those are 1600 miles away from where I am, so I cannot dig in and try to correlate physical decks against any of those "documents". That may change over the next few weeks, as I expect to travel and be with her for a while but not until the immediate need arises. I will work on trying to generate a real inventory based on what I can glean over phone calls and the like, however. Specifics aside, the long-term need will remain to get the decks physically out of the house and on their way to happy new owners. _H* |
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gregory Administrator
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You may very well find people show an interest in specific decks once you have that information. We have discussed a few possibilities, ad I have some suggestions along those lines, but let's see what can sell here first. It might be worth your checking the ISO threads in case any of her decks happen to be listed there, of course ! Very best wishes to your mother - I am a great fan of her work. |
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hobbit Member
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Update: I'm finally on-site at Mom's house, and took a quick eyeball at the visible collection. Looks like a touch over 100 standard-size decks on display in their own boxes, and another half-dozen in homemade wrappers tucked away. Then, about 35 large-format decks/packages which are probably a deck/book package in a larger box. Real inventory will wait until to she comes back home from the therapy facility tomorrow and can guide figuring out what's what, hopefully over the weekend. _H* |
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hobbit Member
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[Posted into multiple spaces] Okay, with my Mom's guidance, I've gone through the entire on-site inventory and her notes and have come up with a complete index of everything physically present, including links for the majority of items back to the pages on AT for easy reference. http://bgw.works/tarot-inv.html At the end is a picture of my work-process - she has two monster looseleaf binders, with neatly assembled details on each deck, with text details, clippings from paper catalogs that she used to receive, and in a couple of cases, example card backs if a deck had those informational extras that aren't essential. The list started with one of her online documents and built from it in flat-text form and turned into some token HTML, with the last step being to hunt down a link, if available, in the huge AT index. I'll likely be bringing all of this home with me when I return to Boston, but if some appropriate brokering opportunity arose in the meantime, they could wind up getting shipped someplace completely different. I encourage further discussion of options. Again, community benefit is the primary driving motive here, not self-enrichment. I've included a human-readable hint to an email address if that works better than forum mechanics. _H* |