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| Posted: Thu Jul 14th, 2022 03:35 pm |
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1st Post |
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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| Posted: Thu Jul 14th, 2022 03:39 pm |
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2nd Post |
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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| Posted: Thu Jul 14th, 2022 06:16 pm |
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3rd Post |
gregory
Administrator
| Joined: | Wed Sep 12th, 2007 |
| Location: | United Kingdom |
| Posts: | 3281 |
| Status: |
Online
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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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| Posted: Fri Jul 29th, 2022 03:41 am |
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4th Post |
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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| Posted: Sun Jul 31st, 2022 01:00 am |
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5th Post |
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*
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