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.

The Hoodoo Tarot feels like a spiritual history lesson woven into divination. It doesn’t just guide, it educates, honors, and channels the spirit of rootwork and Ancestral practices of the African American South.

This deck helped me deepen my understanding of ancestral ingenuity and ritual. Each card feels like a portal, not only to the message but to the spirits and stories that shaped our survival and power. It’s a must-have if you're drawn to Ancestral reverence and tradition-based tarot.

I not only wanted to understand the symbolism and philosophy of the Tarot, but I have also always been curious about how people in the past before occultists discovered the Tarot, made use of the cards for divination.

Matthews has researched this more than any other author. She points out that rather than creating lists of meanings for the cards that needed to be memorized, they tended to relate directly to the imagery. This approach has influenced my use of the cards for divination.

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. 

This book is the best I've come across that explores the overlap between games and fortune-telling with detailed examples from cultures around the world.

The suggestion in the book's title that board games originated from attempts to divine the future is perhaps questionable, but there is no doubt that the two have been entwined from the earliest times, which is not surprising because all games try to some extent to create a microcosm of some of life's aspects and people have never been able to resist trying to nudge things in a favorable direction. Or at least get a heads up on what lies around the corner.

Ludomancy, it's called–a lovely word. Personally, I find that playing some form of Patience is a great way of ordering the mind before tackling any piece of work or, in fact, any tricky life decision. The flickering images conjured by the cards help… show more.

Jessa Crispin’s Creative Tarot suggests ways to connect to one’s muse through tarot. Crispin’s chapters match each tarot card’s essence to artists, thinkers, philosophers, and writers, looking at challenges and gifts each personality encountered over the course of their lifetime (and how they manifested in detriment or bloom). One of my favorite lines makes tarot card exploration forever relevant: Crispin writes, “It is about retelling the present.” And it is about how to ground tarot energy in specifics: what does it mean to be a King of Cups? Who has lived such an incarnation? Her “living examples” make tarot tangible for my students; I love her specific suggestions for how to explore the energy of each tarot card through music, film, paintings, art, and literature.