This is an extremely interesting book, focusing on the inspirations of both AE Waite as the designer of the deck and Pamela Coleman Smith as the artist, especially given that they didn't seem to communicate much if at all about the process. Waite is working from a Golden Dawn/Catholic mystical/Kabbalistic perspective; Smith is an artist of the arts & crafts school who was heavily involved in theatre. She worked off of his direction (and apparently off of some Golden Dawn tarot materials) but Waite never cared much about the details of the art except in a couple of cases, so there's lots of interesting symbolism to dredge out of Smith's tastes and experiences.

There are three major components to this book: the histories and biographies of the creators, a detailed breakdown of each card (which is sometimes simply Waite's text from the Pictorial Key, and sometimes includes additional information), and some information on Waite's strategies for reading, supplemented by material that belonged to a secret order at the time he published but which is available now. I focused on the first two parts in this reading; I might go back to the third in the future, but I'm just not as kabbalistic as Waite and so those correspondences are less interesting to me. ( )