Gilbert’s collection at the Embassy showcases a lot of Waite’s early books, which I would like to address in another publication, and are currently unavailable and crucial to conjoining Waite’s work as a whole: from the romantic poet to a mystical-esoteric Waite, when he published under the pseudonym Grand Orient, and later to the intellectual influence he had on the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

One of the true treasures of the collection, without a doubt, is Gilbert’s collection of Waite-Smith tarot decks, a set of cards launched in 1909, painted by Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951), and first published by Rider. In fact, there are some rare early printed Waite-Smith tarot decks in his collection, all in good condition.

There are two curious cards in this collection, in black and white, depicting the Two of Cups. These black-and-white cards are particularly interesting and cannot be easily explained. From this arises a very intriguing research question about the way the collector arranges his decks, how he places his cards, how he organizes them in boxes; after all, this collection was structured by Gilbert himself.

The cards could indeed have been published, possibly from a set issued long after the fact. However, I believe these cards to be true rarities. Because of their production and publication through lithography, that is, a printing technique using stone plates, these cards were probably some sort of draft from a preliminary stage of production or models for other cards to be printed. This hypothesis is endorsed by the fact that they have the same back patterns as the Pam-A one (short for Pamela-A, a consecrated term for the 1910 version). The way they are stored alongside a Pam-A already becomes historical evidence per se: why would Gilbert put two equal random cards from a recent deck alongside with older ones?

When one opens the tarot boxes, the first look may drive the examiner to the iconographic or the aesthetic dimension of the tarot alone. But the researcher ought to consider also its material quality, its constitution, as an object.

In this sense, the finger marks on the back of the cards are important tracks. Such marks are common when we examine other historical decks, since card reading involves the act of shuffling. However, examining other cards used for oracular purposes, it is rather common to have worn edges. These cards’ edges are almost intact.

Another hypothesis that reinforces the rarity of these cards is the possibility that Gilbert may have shown them to someone else multiple times, or even more likely, that they were used as a prototype in the lithographic impression, which would justify the fingerprints on the back. This first hypothesis is yielded by tarot expert Frank-Jensen, who stated that there would be black and white cards to serve as prototypes.

Of course, this is impossible to know exactly, because Robert Gilbert sold his collection to the Embassy of the Free Mind in the 2000s. However, it is very interesting to note that he had original publications of the deck (which I helped to classify, but of course, as a hypothesis).

One of the limitations of these classifications concerns the fact that the main source, Frank Jensen’s The Story of the Waite-Smith Tarot, needs more improvement, despite all his research and his obsession – in the best sense possible – with the history of tarot. Another difficulty is that at the time, there were not so many resources, images, and texts available for this classification.

However, classifying images into editorial patterns makes it possible to date tarot decks as historical documents. Cataloguing these decks places the researcher at the intersection of editorial patterns, but also highlights that these very editorial and commercial standards are what allow the historian to catalogue and interpret these historical documents.

The collection is of great importance for all researchers interested in the history of cartomancy, the tarot, and esotericism in a broader sense, but also, of course, for the Waite-Smith deck’s history.