This new edition of Lost Envoy: The Tarot Deck Of Austin Osman Spare contains a substantial amount of new and revised material, including a major new discovery about Spare's sources for the attributions on his deck, hitherto unknown. 

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.

“There are, of course, hundreds of new Tarot decks available today and every artist or designer has something to say about why their deck is different and special. So why is Spare’s deck worth our attention? Each of the contributors to Lost Envoy answers this question […] While Spare’s creative isolation and failure to publish his deck does mean that its influence has been virtually non-existent, Lost Envoy heralds the end of its obscurity and the real beginning of its influence on cartomancy and cartomancy decks.”  ––Emily E. Auger, Preternature