Authentic answers to the best questions about this purr-vocative project! FAQs.

No, it really (really, really) isn’t. We have made that very clear from the beginning to avoid confusion but unfortunately we do still see people thinking the The Bohemian Cats Theatre Tarot is connected to the original deck.  All we can do is keep repeating that it isn’t and hope no-one shouts at us when they realise that the original deck is not going to be re-issued!

As the images emerge you can now see clearly that this is an entirely new deck, though it is set in the familiar world of The Bohemian Cats.

Let us explain further. So, if we think of it like a book series, then, as an example, Alice Through the Looking Glass is an entirely new book – it isn’t a new version of Alice in Wonderland. But both are set in the world of Wonderland.

In much the same way, The Bohemian Cats Theatre Tarot is an entirely new tarot deck with its own “story” – it follows the theatrical performances of a troupe of travelling actor cats.

It is, however, set in the familiar world of The Bohemian Cats in all their costumed oddness. Though as a studio there is more than 20 years between the two decks, so our illustration style has now very much evolved.

We don’t have any plans at all to do another version of The Baroque Bohemian Cats’ Tarot. If you are wondering why,  please take a look at this video.  But we hope you will love the all new Bohemian Cats Theatre Tarot just as much – if not more!

We expect shipping of pre-orders for both decks to begin in March 2026. We will ship them in the sequence in which they were placed as far as possible. 

Once your parcel has been posted, within two working days you will receive your shipping confirmation email which includes a link to the tracking information.

We will make the remaining large-format limited edition decks available to buy on our online shops once the pre-orders have been shipped. We will let people know in advance when they will be available through our customer newsletter and social media.

If you are not already subscribed to our newsletter, you can sign up through the pop-up window on our online shop.

We will decide the print run based on the pre-orders. It is really difficult for us to assess the print run before we see the numbers of pre-orders and this is one reason that pre-orders are so helpful to us.

We do think this print run will be fairly large, though please bear in mind that we are a small, independent design/art studio, not a large corporate, so our print numbers are not on a mass-market scale.

We are being asked this quite a lot and sadly, the answer is that it’s not possible.

At the very beginning of the project (five years ago now) we did try using some photos sent to us and we very quickly realised that we could not work with them. This is what we need in a photo:

• • Very sharp focus (you’d be amazed how many perfectly nice photos are actually not all that sharp).
  • NO processing or filters – this ruins our ability to adjust the image as needed.
  • High resolution – phone shots are rarely good enough for us to use.
  • The right expression for the image/card – this is crucial and not easy.
  • The right lighting – our images are theatrical and so we often have quite particular needs for the direction and intensity of the lighting. Sure, we can adjust this a bit in Photoshop, but the image looks far better if the lighting is authentic rather than digital.
  • The right kind of cat and the right gender – we want a variety in the deck and we feel that certain cats suit certain cards and their meanings better.
  • Plain background so that it’s possible to cut out the cat neatly and sharply.
  • Paws at the right angle (this is probably the easiest of the requirements).

Also, we very often combine several cat photos to get our final result. The important thing is, in the end, that the card image works and is as good as it can possibly be. So even if you could meet all the necessary requirements, we could not guarantee that your cat would be all that recognisable in the final image.

This is why, while we would love to have everyone’s cats in the deck, it is just not feasible. Thanks – and love to all the cats out there.

Yes, there will be a large-format limited edition.

We aren’t sure yet. Expenses – for everything from salaries for our employees, to cardstock to printing – has gone up so it’s becoming hard to maintain our “usual” prices. We will do our best – and we will offer pre-order discounts as pre-orders help us plan our print run numbers and the discount is a nice way of thanking people for this.

Yes, there will be a full companion book. We expect this to have coloured illustrations and, as ever, there will be explanations of the cards, spreads and other useful information.

We get asked this a lot and we would love to contact people individually. However, if we did that, then sending lots of identical “decks are available” emails would only get us blocked as spam by servers. Not great!

The good news, though, is that we have a newsletter and you can sign up for updates and news.  We always send out first notifications of deck availability via the newsletter, so please be sure to subscribe through the pop-up window on our online shop.

We can’t take bookings via email/messaging/social media etc – we would get literally hundreds if not thousands and we have no way of doing the necessary organisation and admin. 

Please be sure to place your pre-order when they go live.  With more recent launches we have been releasing pre-orders at two times in the day to allow for different time zones so we are doing our very best to make the process as fair as possible.

We were asked this in a slightly testy exchange on our Facebook pages recently, so we thought we would show our answers (enlarged and also slightly edited for clarity) here to explain why, for us, a new version of a deck is far from a “press a button” process.

There are several reasons why we don’t keep reprinting:

• TIME! 

That’s the most important limitation for us. Every time we do a new edition or a reprint, it takes months of our time. We need to get The Bohemian Cats’ Theatre Tarot done and it will never happen if we keep having to spend time on reprints of other decks.

Please understand we are NOT just sending files out for mass production. We print and produce in Europe, with small companies and our design and production methods are much more hands-on and take a lot of time, focus and effort. We are not a mass production business.

To expand on this a little:

• Who has to redesign each new edition? Alex and me.Who has to then make those changes? Alex and me.
• Who has to set everything up for cold stamping (changes nearly every time as we try new techniques)? Alex.
• Who decides on changes for the companion books and then does the new writing? Me.
• Who writes all the new listings etc and organises the pre-orders etc? Me and Cathy.

These things take huge amounts of time – typically 2-3 months of work for each new edition. We are a small studio, not a big publishing house.

• Finances

We were asked years ago why we don’t just print a lot and make loads of money. But business, particularly when it’s a small, creative studio business, doesn’t really work like that. Most businesses (more than 80% it’s thought) fail not because of profit, but because of cash-flow. Printing a larger number of decks would mean having them sitting on the shelves for years. That ties up cash and let’s face it, you can’t pay salaries with decks. For us, it’s far too risky.

Right now, we try to print enough “standard” decks to last at least two years. That is a good balance between meeting demand and not tying up all the studio’s finances in decks sitting on shelves.

• Creativity

We honestly, in any case, wouldn’t want to have decks from 10 or 15 years back sitting on our shelves even if we could afford to (which we can’t – see above). We are a STUDIO, a creative business.  Every time we finish a deck and look at it a few months later, we see things that we might want to do differently. That’s the nature of creativity. We like being able to revise decks – and in our experience, our customers also often like to see a new version of an old favourite.

Good question! It seems such a logical step, doesn’t it?

We actually did try to do exactly this when The Alice Tarot pre-order was launched years ago and sadly, it didn’t work and probably made things worse. This is what we discovered:

• Mostly, it isn’t an issue. Most people buy two at most – one as a back-up – and we think this is fair enough. We also don’t mind people selling or trading on their back-up deck, It’s their deck after all, to do as they like with.
• If you impose a limit on numbers of decks that can be purchased via the shops, then we found that people just create a second name and address to buy more. We can’t really challenge that, even if we suspect it (see also below).
• We can’t prevent people buying to resell as we are not a detective agency and have no way of knowing for sure. In the past, we found that when we challenged people who bought, say, six decks, they tended to just say that they were buying for a tarot group or for their friends and family. We neither have the resources, nor the desire (it can feel very uncomfortable to doubt someone’s explanation), to then try to find out if this is true or not. So we had to take them at their word – and of course, people DO in fact buy for friends so often it’s entirely bona fide.
• We very occasionally might query a pre-order if someone was buying a ridiculous number (we once had someone try to buy an ENTIRE pre-order!) but this would be a rare event.
• We do allow some wholesalers to buy larger quantities of decks, but this is at our discretion and tends to be in countries where we might have issues reaching those users and prefer to work via a wholesaler. We wholesale to very few retailers so in any case this is not a big issue.

Please see our informative blog post, “Decks on the Back of Shelves” about this over on our studio blog.