Dear Barbara,
The book cover! The box cover!
It's hard to see all the detail in these scans, but what I can see, I love. You're right, Lisa is really good. I like the border around the cards, and the way she put the profile of Victoria inside a little square doodad. It looks much better that way.
Interesting card choices. I'm not surprised that you all wanted the Moon on the outer box -- when I showed the deck to Jim Garrison in Chicago (was that two years ago??) he commented on how much that card has in common with Llewellyn's identity. I think his exact words were "this has to be a Llewellyn deck. It already looks like one!"
The Empress, the Lovers and the 3 of Cups are all good choices too. Those are cards that I think of as "crowd-pleasers": they're pretty and happy, and they're cards that people like to look at. But the 6 of Wands and Justice surprised me. Not because I don't like them -- I do -- but they don't give the viewer a warm fuzzy the way the 3 of Cups does. Justice especially is more complicated and darker, not just visually but conceptually.
I think that's wonderful. Putting a card like Justice on the front of the box will show people that V/R isn't all sweetness and light, pretty corseted ladies dancing and riding bicycles. It will give the impession of a deck with more substance. (of course, now V/R has to live up to that impression!)
There's another reason that I'm very happy Justice is on the front cover. Because that image started out really large: I had to make a copy of a copy to reduce it down enough to fit. That makes the art less crisp than most of the others. I've been a little uneasy all along that Justice was one of the cards that wouldn't reproduce well. But Lisa wouldn't have put it on the front of the box if it hadn't turned out well. And if Justice reproduced well, they all will.
Lisa says she's going to send me better jpegs so I can see the images more clearly. Luckily I have a cable modem so I can receive big files. She says the ivory tint has a pattern in it. I can't wait to see the little details like that, and the pattern around the cards. I wonder if the actual card borders will look like that too?
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