Lo Scarabeo: The Turin Publisher Behind Hundreds of Decks

Lo Scarabeo is the Italian publishing house most responsible for the sheer variety of tarot decks on shelves worldwide today. Founded in Turin in the late 1980s, the company built its business on a model earlier tarot publishers had rarely tried at scale: print a deck in several languages simultaneously, pair it with a compact guidebook, and distribute it through ordinary bookshops rather than specialist occult suppliers. Decades later, its catalogue runs into the hundreds of titles, from historical reconstructions to entirely new artist-driven designs.

The company's approach separated the business of tarot publishing from the business of tarot teaching. Earlier in this series, decks arrived bundled with a specific reading philosophy, whether the Golden Dawn's structured curriculum behind Crowley and Harris's Thoth deck, or Vicki Noble's feminist framework behind the The Motherpeace Tarot: Round Cards and Goddess Spirituality. Lo Scarabeo instead positioned itself primarily as a producer and distributor, commissioning artists for distinctive visual styles while keeping accompanying texts relatively brief, aimed at browsers in a shop rather than students in a lodge.

A catalogue built on partnership, not a single house style

Turin's publisher rarely imposes one artistic vision across its decks. Instead, it commissions illustrators working in wildly different styles, from historical pastiche to photographic collage to manga-influenced linework, and lets each deck stand as its own project. This editorial model let the company respond quickly to shifting tastes: a deck referencing a popular aesthetic could reach print faster than a traditional publisher's slower, singular catalogue. For international distribution, Lo Scarabeo has long partnered with established foreign publishers, most notably Llewellyn Worldwide in the United States, which has helped many of its titles reach English-language readers who might never have found an Italian import on their own.

Reviving historical decks alongside new ones

Alongside new commissions, the company has issued facsimile and restoration editions of historical patterns, including versions associated with the Tarot de Marseille and earlier regional traditions. This dual strategy, old and new printed side by side under one imprint, meant a single publisher could serve both a reader hunting for a historically grounded deck like Nicolas Conver's and a reader wanting something visually unlike anything printed before. The Nicolas Conver and the Tarot de Marseille of 1760 tradition and a brand-new artist's take could sit on the same catalogue page, something few earlier publishers attempted deliberately.

Why an industrial model changed the hobby

Before publishers working at this scale existed, acquiring an unusual tarot deck often meant tracking down a small press run or an import from a specialist shop, the kind of scarcity that shaped how the The Aquarian Tarot: David Palladini's Art Nouveau Deck circulated in its early years. Lo Scarabeo's volume production changed that calculus. A reader curious about dozens of different visual traditions could now buy several decks a year at modest cost, turning deck collecting itself into a widespread hobby rather than a niche pursuit limited to serious students. That shift reshaped what "owning a tarot deck" meant for a casual buyer, separate from any claim about which deck was most authentic or most powerful. It also changed how readers compared decks against each other. A student could set three or four interpretations of the Major Arcana side by side on the same desk, something that had rarely been practical when decks arrived one at a time from scattered small presses, each hard to find and harder to replace.

Lo Scarabeo's legacy: a publisher, not a single artist

Unlike most of the figures and movements traced elsewhere in this series, Lo Scarabeo's historical importance lies in infrastructure rather than authorship. No single artist or theorist defines its identity the way Pamela Colman Smith defines the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. Its legacy is the sheer number of readers who met the tarot for the first time through an affordable, widely stocked deck bearing its name on the box, whatever style that particular deck happened to use.

That scale brought its own criticisms. Collectors and scholars sometimes argue that rapid, high-volume publishing favours striking cover art over careful symbolic coherence, and that a few titles in any large catalogue inevitably read as rushed. Lo Scarabeo's defenders counter that the same volume has preserved space for smaller, odder decks that a more cautious publisher might never have risked printing at all, since a handful of commercial successes can subsidise many niche titles within one catalogue.

Today the company remains one of the largest tarot and oracle card publishers in the world, still based in Turin. General background on the modern tarot publishing industry is summarised on the Tarot Wikipedia page.

FAQ

What kind of company is Lo Scarabeo? It is an Italian publisher of tarot and oracle decks, based in Turin, known for producing a very large and varied catalogue.

Does Lo Scarabeo design its own decks? It commissions many different illustrators for distinct visual styles rather than enforcing one house look across its titles.

How does Lo Scarabeo reach English-language readers? It has long partnered with foreign publishers, notably Llewellyn Worldwide, to distribute its decks internationally.

Does the company only publish new decks? No. It also prints facsimile and restoration editions of historical patterns alongside its newer artist-driven decks.