Tarot History Forum

God, okay, I know this has to be the most gauche thing to ask about but I'm having just a hell of a time finding actual information about it and I turn to you, gracious historians of the THF, in my hour of need:

why on earth is the Smith-Waite the default tarot deck (in America, at least)?!

don't get me wrong, I like it just fine as a deck. But there are so many before and so, so many after; and certainly most of the decks spoken about on this forum are also old enough to be in the public domain, so that can't be it. I know the deck was pirated in America ~1916, but is that enough? Am I underestimating the importance of it as a product of the Golden Dawn? Crowley's Book of Thoth enjoyed some success but doesn't seem to have gone mainstream the same way that the Smith-Waite has. Did the marketing department at Rider & Son have geniuses working there, or did they just get really lucky? Was its popularity dependent on those pirated copies being circulated organically?

Or is my understanding of this skewed?

Smith-Waite success ....

https://www.sashagraham.com/post/rememb ... art-kaplan

... maybe this was Stuart Kaplan's marketing

https://www.usgamesinc.com/Stephen-Wini ... aplan.html
On a visit to Germany, he visited the Nuremberg Toy Fair, partly to seek gifts for his five children, and partly to satisfy his own curiosity about games. He also remembers another motive: “As a total departure from my job,” he said, “I thought it would be interesting to explore the possibilities of importing gift and game items.”
Tarot encOn the last day of the fair, Kaplan came across a small exhibition booth belonging to AG Müller & Cie of Neuhausen, Switzerland. “They had a Swiss 1JJ Tarot deck tucked away in a corner of the booth along with the range of Swiss playing cards that they manufactured,” he remembered. “I picked up the deck and had no idea what it was except that it seemed interesting. The images on the cards intrigued me. I am a researcher at heart, and I planned to study each of the images on the 22 Major Arcana in hopes of unraveling their meaning, and learning about the origin of the images.”
Kaplan decided to make the Swiss 1JJ Tarot (also known as the 1JJ Swiss Tarot and the Tarot 1JJ) his test case in the field of game imports. “I negotiated the rights and ordered 5,000 decks,” he recalled. “AG Müller wasn't selling that many Tarot decks in an entire year, and they thought it was surprising that anyone would want to purchase so many Tarot decks, but I saw some possibilities in distributing them in the States.”
https://www.buecher.de/artikel/buch/1jj ... gIWk_D_BwE
This was not the Rider-Waite, but ...

My guess: illustrated pips make reading easier because someone has defined the card meaning and illustrated it.

From 1909 until 1969 Thoth, I guess the Waite Smith was the only game in town for divination. Then.., boom, the clones! Most people probably think that the Thoth is just another, albeit slightly modified, version of the Waite-Smith.

Huck wrote: 19 Apr 2025, 09:59 Smith-Waite success ....

https://www.sashagraham.com/post/rememb ... art-kaplan

... maybe this was Stuart Kaplan's marketing

https://www.usgamesinc.com/Stephen-Wini ... aplan.html
On a visit to Germany, he visited the Nuremberg Toy Fair, partly to seek gifts for his five children, and partly to satisfy his own curiosity about games. He also remembers another motive: “As a total departure from my job,” he said, “I thought it would be interesting to explore the possibilities of importing gift and game items.”
Tarot encOn the last day of the fair, Kaplan came across a small exhibition booth belonging to AG Müller & Cie of Neuhausen, Switzerland. “They had a Swiss 1JJ Tarot deck tucked away in a corner of the booth along with the range of Swiss playing cards that they manufactured,” he remembered. “I picked up the deck and had no idea what it was except that it seemed interesting. The images on the cards intrigued me. I am a researcher at heart, and I planned to study each of the images on the 22 Major Arcana in hopes of unraveling their meaning, and learning about the origin of the images.”
Kaplan decided to make the Swiss 1JJ Tarot (also known as the 1JJ Swiss Tarot and the Tarot 1JJ) his test case in the field of game imports. “I negotiated the rights and ordered 5,000 decks,” he recalled. “AG Müller wasn't selling that many Tarot decks in an entire year, and they thought it was surprising that anyone would want to purchase so many Tarot decks, but I saw some possibilities in distributing them in the States.”
https://www.buecher.de/artikel/buch/1jj ... gIWk_D_BwE
This was not the Rider-Waite, but ...

Stuart Kaplan championing the deck makes a lot of sense. Somebody with relative means going out of his way to try out a venture and really doubling down on it makes a lot more sense than a sort of ambient phenomenon. Foolishly, I hadn't even considered US Games as a company to investigate; I had it in my head they were a branch of another company like Rider ended up.
I can't make out the last link... the ellipses cuts off the end of the link and I don't know German well enough to figure out what it's linked to. Could you repost it please?

Robert wrote: My guess: illustrated pips make reading easier because someone has defined the card meaning and illustrated it.

From 1909 until 1969 Thoth, I guess the Waite Smith was the only game in town for divination. Then.., boom, the clones! Most people probably think that the Thoth is just another, albeit slightly modified, version of the Waite-Smith.

Yeah I had some speculation about it being just better product design selling the deck and explaining book as a unit. Falconnier and Papus had Major Arcana decks but they required you cut up their books and paste them onto backing to use 'em. which people will do, but only if they're already sold on the idea. A lot of the divinatory decks before the Smith-Waite are either just playing card decks like tarot is originally, hand-made, or extremely limited run. And I guess by the time Marteau repackaged the Marseilles deck as a fortune telling pack, Smith-Waite had been the standard for a good, I don't know, 20 years?

But then you have Grimaud and Robert and Watilliaux publishing petit lenormand and Etteilla and Princesse packs for cartomancy in France since 1800. and fortune telling was, like, a viable job for a while there, if I understand my reading right. Was it just that the English Smith-Waite jumped the pond easier? IS it the standard in other countries? I genuinely don't know that for sure.

It seems like maybe all told the market niche (to be crass) for divinatory tarot was never that big to begin with but Smith-Waite managed to fill it by smoothing out some of the friction points of previous decks (illustrating the pips, deck+book prefabbed together, relatively wide distribution). And then, I'm guessing someone in the New Age movement cites it as a default--I mean, hey, if we're basing magical societies off of the Golden Dawn's blueprint, why not grab its deck?--and then, ????something happens?????, and suddenly there's soooo many decks.

Time to read up on New Age history, I guess!

You would definitely have to do some research, but from what I have picked up on from reading some posts about the phenomena, in the 60s the RWS and the PKT were the only source, and you had to mail off for it from an ad in the back of a cheesy new age magazine. Old timers like katrinka, Saturn Celeste and Misterei have mentioned it a few times. It may very well have come down to marketing. I missed this craze by just a few years (being a preteen in the late 70s unlike them who are a few years older than me.) There were shopping malls where I had access to decks in the early 80s, so I had a few more options. I got my first deck, the Dali Tarot, for $88 in 1988, I distinctly remember, and my first book was Eilleen Connolly's "Tarot: Handbook for the New Apprentice."

firecatpickles wrote: 20 Apr 2025, 20:37 You would definitely have to do some research, but from what I have picked up on from reading some posts about the phenomena, in the 60s the RWS and the PKT were the only source, and you had to mail off for it from an ad in the back of a cheesy new age magazine. Old timers like katrinka, Saturn Celeste and Misterei have mentioned it a few times. It may very well have come down to marketing. I missed this craze by just a few years (being a preteen in the late 70s unlike them who are a few years older than me.) There were shopping malls where I had access to decks in the early 80s, so I had a few more options. I got my first deck, the Dali Tarot, for $88 in 1988, I distinctly remember, and my first book was Eilleen Connolly's "Tarot: Handbook for the New Apprentice."

This is such a good point. I don't actually know how old most brick and mortar new age/spiritual shops are. If you dropped me in 1920's England I would have no idea where to get a tarot deck. Bookstores? Toy stores?? Did publishers/printers have their own storefronts? I don't know where I'd pick up any occult manuscripts/magazines Wirth and Waite et al. were publishing in either. I can somehow more easily imagine picking up a deck fresh off the artist's etching block in Renaissance Italy.

(Funky culture shock looking back not even that far into the past, having grown up with an internet at my fingertips. ^^' )

That sense of cultural whiplash really resonates—distribution shaped everything back then, from tarot decks to who even got access to ideas. Scarcity made those early decks feel almost mythical, and owning one meant something.

Distribution and accessibility really shaped which decks became standard. Smith-Waite probably just hit the right combination of marketing and availability at the right time

Smith-Waite Tarot Deck became the standard https://destinymatrics.com/major-arcana/ deck mainly because it was designed to be very easy for beginners, with clear illustrated meanings on all 78 cards, which made learning tarot much simpler compared to older systems. Over time, it was widely adopted in English-speaking countries for teaching and books, and most modern tarot decks are actually based on its structure, which made it the default reference system for tarot reading today.