100 books like Two Tracts on Cartomancy

This is an unreliable but very readable book from occult writer Kenneth Grant. I used to find the title mysterious; it really means images and oracular worlds, and I remember seeing great heaps of this book remaindered in the 1980s, little knowing it would go on to fetch £300 a copy. Fortunately, Fulgur have since produced an affordable edition.

Grant’s depiction of Spare is heavily influenced by his reading of popular fiction writers like Arthur Machen, Sax Rohmer, and H.P. Lovecraft, and he gives us Spare, the black magician seduced in childhood by an elderly witch, who launches “an amphibious owl with the wings of a bat” into a conflict between magical groups. This is really the book that started the “Spare Mythos.”

A warm, down-to-earth amateur biography of Spare, which is also a memoir of the author’s friendship with him. A mildly eccentric man who went on to run a secondhand bookshop in Hastings, Letchford sought Spare out in 1937, when he was a twenty-one-year-old shop assistant, after reading about him in a newspaper, and went on to become his most loyal friend.

At the opposite pole to Grant (they only met at Spare’s deathbed), this is Spare the canny, opinionated Cockney and South Londoner, but there is not much magic in it. Spare valued both Grant and Letchford, although he had a couple of rows with Grant. In the end, he might have felt closer to Letchford, leaving him “first choice” of pictures in his will and Grant second.

Grant met Spare in 1949 through his wife Steffi, who had read a ‘human interest’ feature about him in a magazine. Based on Grant’s diary, this book records the real Spare in the pubs of South London and the West End before Grant semi-fictionalized him.

Grant had a sense of humour, and after introducing Spare to witchcraft revivalist Gerald Gardner, he watched him try to outdo Gardner in boasting about witchcraft, then went home and wrote that it was “screamingly funny.”

This is a substantial tome, beautifully produced and illustrated, with plenty of time-travelling period detail. Steffi remembers when pubs had live pianists, often playing ‘The Harry Lime Theme’ from The Third Man: “It seemed the signature tune of Spare at that period, and hearing it now fills me with nostalgia.”

This complete compendium of Spare’s exhibition catalogues has been put together by the great Robert Ansell, a pioneering figure in Spare research. Running from 1907 to 1955, complete with their catalogue essays and some related bits of ephemera, the facsimile catalogues slowly change in their period feel and give the real trajectory of Spare’s career, all the way through to his late shows in pubs.

The book has a generous additional colour section of pictures, and it is all surprisingly readable and even vivid: “Not long now!” says the flyer for an upcoming exhibition in the Mansion House Tavern pub in south London: “The show you’ve been waiting for!” 

Jessica Dore’s book is a revelation.

Coming from a psychological view of the cards, Dore incorporates ideas from different psychological schools of thought such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Dialectical Behavior Therapy, and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy as well as Greek myth, Arthurian legend, folklore, fairy tales, and more.

Dore offers a unique, modern, and very personal approach to the cards and their meanings. A fascinating example for anyone building their own tarot practice and figuring out what tarot means to them on a personal and individual level.

I found the discussions in this book to deepen the understanding of what I had gained from Italian-American folk tradition and magic that I first came across in Italian Folk Magic.

With discussions of saint veneration, ancestor veneration, ritual, and more, this book gave my magical practice more depth and direction. 

The title of this book says it all. It is about effective, practical magic with an emphasis on manifestation. Six ways an incantation that is as simple as it is powerful. The book goes into detail about different styles of magic that are available for readers who want to learn more about sorcery, witchcraft, chaos magic, and spirit work. I like this book because it takes one deep into the inner world of magic that exists within the recesses of the mind, opening up the practitioner to spiritual possibilities that have the goal of improving the self. Techniques such as meditation, trance, spiritual cleansing, and dreams are dealt with in an easy and straightforward way.

In this book, Christopher Marmalejo entranced us with a singular take on investigating tarot cards through a queer and Indigenous lens. Exploring cartomancy as a mirror to understand lived experience, Christopher brings to light a practice that is unafraid to confront, listen, critique, and unveil.

We love how Christopher’s personality shines through this thoroughly academic yet approachable description of tarot cards and their uses. Reading it filled us with hope for a future of liberation and ideas of how we can make that happen.

Over the years, when I taught tarot classes, there were always a few students who were interested in the divination aspect of tarot, but tarot was just not the right oracle for them. For animal lovers, I recommended the simpler and more direct Medicine Cards: The Discovery of Power Through the Ways of Animals by Jamie Sam's and David Carson because animal totems resonated with them. 

I recall a student who was of Norwegian ancestry who found tarot overwhelming, but the right oracle for him was The Book of Runes by Ralph H. Bloom. Even if tarot is your path, it's interesting to know of the many forms of divination that can be available to everyone.

I had never been to The Cloisters here in Manhattan after many decades of living here, but I read Katy Hays's book, and had to visit it afterward. Hays’ book was a great pre-cursor to the trip to the Museum of Medieval and Early Renaissance Art.

I kept in mind the world of the fictional underdog, Anne Sitwell, who worked her way up to know there were secrets in the vault at the Cloisters. A Tarot Deck, possibly from the d’Este family in Italy, sets the stage for skullduggery while secrets and murders mount, leading to a plot twist at the end for our hapless Anne. It was interesting talking to the docent at the museum after I took a garden tour, and to spot a copy of this book for sale in the gift shop there.