I recently reviewed the Tarot de Paris for TarotBG after purchasing the deck from them. This is a wonderful Tarot de Marseille deck from the early 1700s. My review is below or you can read it on their site here. Patrick Coq, one of the worlds leading experts on the Tarot de Marseille wrote a very interesting description of the deck. You can read it here. His company, editions SIVILIXI, produces other ancient facsimile decks like the Tarot de Jacques Vieville.
The review:
I became interested in this TdM type 1 deck after reading Patrick Coq’s paper at http://editions-sivilixi.com/the-tarot-of-paris/. What a wonder to be able to peek at the designs of tarot in the early 17th century! This is a facsimile deck by Andre Dimanche, 1985 from images from an original deck kept at the Bibliotheque National de France. Many images are wholly unique! Card stock is excellent and the size is typical of most TdM decks with a shape of two squares and squared edges. The only annoyance is a small library stamp impressed in the title area of each card. Oh, well; this is a small price to pay for such a treat!
The deck structure is very standard although many of the images are quite unique! My favorite is The Tower which features a chaotic scene of an occurring or post-occurrence calamity. It is a disturbing nightmarish melange of images and provides the message perhaps more clearly than the common Tower image.
I found it quite easy to read with. I had not expected this after some struggles with another ancient deck – the Tarot of Jacques Vieville. There’s not much of a learning curve here!
Just buy the deck! Any serious student of tarot history or collector of early tarot decks needs this deck.