William Rider & Son
Founded: 1882
Location: London
Decks
Introduction
William Rider & Son was a British publishing house founded in 1882 by William Rider in London. While the firm began as a general printer of trade journals and books, it secured a permanent place in cultural history through two distinct publishing milestones: the 1897 release of Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the 1909 publication of the Tarot deck conceived by Arthur Edward Waite and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. Unlike traditional cardmakers who printed their own wares (such as Grimaud in France), Rider & Son was strictly a publishing house that outsourced the physical production of cards, a distinction that would later impact the print quality of subsequent editions.
Insert Image: [Portrait of Arthur Edward Waite, formal attire, early 20th century]
Caption: Arthur Edward Waite (1857–1942), the scholarly mystic and member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn who commissioned Rider & Son to publish the world’s most recognizable Tarot deck.
History
From Trade Publishing to Literary Fame
The company was established in 1882 as a family business by William Rider. Situated in the heart of London’s printing district, the firm initially focused on trade pamphlets and books. The company’s trajectory changed significantly in 1897 when they published Dracula by Abraham “Bram” Stoker. Stoker, who was managed by Rider’s fiction department, provided the firm with a significant commercial success, establishing their reputation for handling gothic and atmospheric literature (“Bram Stoker’s Publishers” 2025).
The Waite-Smith Collaboration (1909)
In the early 20th century, Rider & Son began to cultivate a reputation for publishing esoteric and occult works. It was this reputation that led Arthur Edward Waite, a prominent member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn—a secret society devoted to the study of the occult, metaphysics, and paranormal activities—to approach the firm.
Waite sought a publisher for a new Tarot deck that would break with the abstract “Marseille” style traditions. He commissioned fellow Golden Dawn member Pamela Colman Smith to illustrate the deck. Rider & Son published the resulting 78-card deck in 1909, alongside Waite’s guidebooks, The Key to the Tarot (1910) and the expanded The Pictorial Key to the Tarot (1911) (Waite 1910; Jensen 2006).
The Naming Controversy: “Rider-Waite” vs. “Waite-Smith”
For much of the 20th century, the deck was colloquially referred to as the “Rider-Waite” Tarot. This nomenclature privileged the commercial publisher (Rider) and the male conceptualizer (Waite) while erasing the contribution of the artist.
It is a point of modern historical consensus that the deck owes much of its enduring popularity to the scenic “pips” (numbered cards) illustrated by Smith. Unlike previous decks where the Four of Cups showed only four chalices, Smith rendered a scene of a figure contemplating the cups, thereby democratizing divination for non-experts. To rectify this historical erasure, the academic and tarot community now refers to the pattern as the Waite-Smith Tarot [1] .
Production Quality and Decline
Because William Rider & Son was a publisher rather than a dedicated card manufacturer, they lacked the specialized machinery and quality control of traditional playing-card factories. The company continued to publish the deck through World War II, but the fidelity of the images degraded over time.
Historian K. Frank Jensen has extensively cataloged these decline periods. In his taxonomy of early editions, Jensen notes that the printing plates—likely lithographic stones or zinc plates—became worn or were replaced by inferior tracings. Jensen characterizes the “Pam-C” variant (a classification for decks produced circa 1931) as the work of an “incompetent copyist,” noting that the line work had lost the sensitivity and nuance of Smith’s original 1909 drawings [2] .
The Modern Era and U.S. Games Systems
Rider & Son continued to sell versions of the deck after World War II, but the modern explosion of Tarot popularity is largely due to American intervention. In the late 1960s, Stuart Kaplan, an American collectibles importer, discovered the deck at a toy fair in Nuremberg. Kaplan obtained a license from Rider & Son to reproduce the deck for the American market.
Through his company, U.S. Games Systems, Kaplan restored the vibrancy of Smith’s work and began distribution in 1971. This licensing deal effectively saved the pattern from the obscurity of poor-quality British reprints and launched the global Tarot renaissance [2] .
Today, William Rider & Son no longer exists as an independent entity; it survives as an imprint of Ebury Publishing, a division of the conglomerate Penguin Random House.