Tarot decks and books for beginners

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Walk into any bookshop and you will find shelves of tarot decks and books. This page is my short, honest guide to what you actually need as a beginner: one deck, one or two good books, and a few free places to study historical cards.

How to choose your first deck

Most beginners do best with a deck in the Rider-Waite-Smith family, because most English-language books and websites, including my card meaning pages, are written for it. But Marseille and Thoth decks are real options too, and size, card stock and art all matter. My full guide, how to choose your first tarot deck, walks you through the three big deck families, what to check before you buy, and why buying your own deck is completely fine.

The deck my pages use

Every card meaning on this site is written for the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, first published in London in 1909 with images by Pamela Colman Smith under A. E. Waite’s direction. It made fully illustrated Minor Arcana scenes standard for many beginners. Today there are many editions and recolorings of it, plus hundreds of decks that keep its scenes in a new style. If you want a standard edition to start with, the Rider Tarot deck from U.S. Games Systems (paid link) is a good starting point.

If you want to know which edition is which, and what “public domain” means for these images, read my page on the Rider-Waite-Smith deck: history and editions.

Books I recommend

These books deepen history, method or layouts. They are starting points, not required homework, and none of them replaces your own judgment.

• Rachel Pollack, Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom (paid link) (first published 1980 and 1983; new edition, Weiser Books, 2019). A classic, thoughtful walk through every card, written for the Rider-Waite-Smith deck.
• Michael Dummett, The Game of Tarot (Duckworth, 1980). The documented history of tarot as a card game. It is a scholarly book, but it is the place to go if you want facts rather than legends.
• My own book, The Novice’s Guide to Tarot. I wrote it for complete beginners. It works with any Rider-Waite-Smith-style deck and covers every card, reversed meanings, spreads and the ethics of reading. It is my own product, so weigh my recommendation with that in mind.

If you read older books too, enjoy them, but separate documented card history from later symbolic overlay. Many older occult histories repeat the claim that tarot comes from ancient Egypt. Tarot began as a card game in fifteenth-century northern Italy. My history of tarot has the timeline.

What to look for in any tarot book

When you pick up a tarot book I have not listed, a few quick checks help:

• Does it match your deck? A book written for Marseille or Thoth will not match the scenes on a Rider-Waite-Smith-style card.
• Does it separate history from legend? Good books say clearly when a claim is documented and when it is a later tradition.
• Does it respect your judgment? Be cautious of any book that promises certainty about the future or tells you a card means disaster.
• Does it talk about ethics? Reading for other people raises questions of consent and confidentiality. A good beginner book covers them.

What you do not need

You do not need a gifted deck, a silk cloth, crystals or a special box. You do not need a rare or expensive edition. A standard deck, a notebook and a pen are enough. If a shop or a seller tells you a deck will only “work” if you buy extra items, you can say no.

Historical decks you can study for free

You do not have to buy anything to look closely at historical tarot cards. Several museums share images of early cards online, many of them free to use.

• The 1909 Rider-Waite-Smith cards. Scans of an early printing are shared on Wikimedia Commons as public domain. You can see sixteen of the Major Arcana in my 1909 tarot gallery.
• The Visconti-Sforza cards. These hand-painted, gilded fifteenth-century Italian cards are among the best-known early tarot cards. The best known set, usually dated to about 1450 to 1480, is split between the Morgan Library and Museum in New York (35 cards), the Accademia Carrara in Bergamo (26) and a private collection (13).
• Early printed tarocchi. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds an Italian woodcut sheet of tarocchi cards from about 1500 (26.101.5), shared through its Open Access program.

My page on museums and open access explains how to find and credit images like these, and tarot in art history tells the story of the cards as objects.

Where to go next

• 11 tarot myths, and what is true
• The Major Arcana and the Fool’s Journey
• Tarot spreads for beginners