BOTANICA: A Tarot Deck about the Language of Flowers
Created by Beehive Books
Explore the biological roots of the Arcana with this gorgeously painted artist's deck.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
BOTANICA Expansion Sneak Peek! Plus, a new series of gorgeous art blankets.
11 months ago
– Fri, Jul 07, 2023 at 12:19:04 PM
Hello botanists!
We have another little tease for you today. Our expanded BOTANICA deck (featuring over 30 new oracle cards!) gets closer every day. Kevin is deep in the greenhouse, planting and painting. We have a front row seat to some genuine magic, and soon you will too.
On our end, we're doing some really cool production experiments right now to figure out what we can do make this new edition stand out from the transcendent decks that Kevin has already created. We cannot wait to share more details with you.
We have a little glimpse below. But, as in the supermarket, you're going to have to walk all the way to the end of this post to get what you're looking for. Because we also wanted to share our new adventure with you.
We've launched ILLUMINATED TAPESTRIES, a series of gorgeously detailed woven blankets by many of our (and your!) favorite artists. Our new series features Lorenzo Mattotti, Michael DeForge, and Ben Passmore, joining our original lineup of Yuko Shimizu, Jim Woodring and Lisa Hanawalt. (Lisa's nude plant-ladies, pictured below, seem very BOTANICA-appropriate! Great picnic blankets for doing readings in the park, we discovered recently.) These blankets are soft cotton, machine washable, made in the USA and limited to an edition of five hundred each. Truly beautiful and unique treasures from astonishing artists.
The campaign is already funded 4x its modest goal, and we'd love to have you on board with us.
Now, onto our sneak peek. We haven't publicly revealed the theme that Kevin is working with for this new expanded deck, but some folks in our communities may have guessed it already based on some of the glimpses that we've shown.
To bring things closer to full bloom, we're ready to reveal the foil-stamped card-back design. (We're thinking of doing it in a pink foil this time, instead of the gold we used last time.)
The theme is perhaps clarifying itself as we sneak more peeks.
We're hoping to launch later this year. Watch this space for more details, friends.
New Adventures! Botanica and Otherwise!
about 1 year ago
– Tue, Mar 28, 2023 at 12:37:58 PM
Dear friends,
We're entering the first bloom of spring -- and that means it's time for some thrilling BOTANICA news.
But we're going to put that at the end of this update, much like supermarkets put the eggs and milk at the back of the store. (Tantalizing hint: there may be more BOTANICA on the way.)
ILLUMINATED EDITIONS is our ongoing imprint of classic fiction with new illustration and design -- but this project is something very different from past entries in this series. This glorious volume contains more than fifty illustrations from Mignola and colorist Dave Stewart, building out Carlo Collodi's puppet-world and restoring the black humor and troubling magic of the original story. But it also includes a full-text annotation from Lemony Snicket, in the form of dozens of inserted typewritten sheets -- a paper-trail of a wild-eyed author, hellbent on encountering the utter strangeness and wonder of Collodi’s visionary tale, unafraid of its increasingly apparent and deeply troubling psychic toll. There at his trusty Smith Corona, swallowed whole by the strange magnetism of Collodi's words, Snicket fell into sort of fugue state, typing and retyping thousands of copies of his frantic, baffled notes, which he insisted on stuffing into each copy of the book.
Thus, our astonishing new Illuminated Edition: a volume burnishing and exploding the legacy of this strange, endlessly adapted and yet often misunderstood, novel. A beautifully illuminated version of the novel, with dozens of pages of inserted typewritten sheets from one of the greatest authors of our time.
And coming very soon -- as we've hinted in previous updates: a new, expanded edition of BOTANICA, featuring dozens of new paintings from the brilliant Kevin Jay Stanton. And we're ready to show one of these beautiful new images.
Kevin once again getting along famously with a Beehive.
We are getting perilously close to a launch date, here. And Kevin is still somehow managing to top himself, as he produces painting after painting. We can't wait to share more with you. When we're ready, you'll be the first to know.
Thanks for being such a wonderful community. Wishing you all the most vernalest of equinoxes,
Bees
New Adventures! A live campaign and the future of BOTANICA.
over 1 year ago
– Mon, Oct 24, 2022 at 01:18:39 AM
Dearest Botanists,
It's been a while! We hope you've all had a lovely summer, and are settling into the beautiful melancholy of the autumn. The leaves are changing and just beginning to fall here in Philly, and there's a bracing spirit in the air. October is the witching season, and we can feel our herbalists and enchanters out in force, working with the spirit, divining and exploring the symbolic language of the world around us.
As the leaves change, we're transforming too. We have two brand new projects on the way! One is an expansion of BOTANICA.. but to get to that impossibly exciting place, you'll have to scroll down.
This is our first time venturing into the world of textiles, and the results have been incredible. We're working with a family business of very experience fabricators in South Carolina, and the level of detail and color they produce out of yarn is frankly astonishing. The blankets are soft and beautiful -- are perfect for spreading out a tarot deck on.
Which brings me to our big BOTANICA news.
Kevin is working on an expanded version of BOTANICA, to go live on Kickstarter early next year!
He's been deep in the hothouse for months, devising dozens of new oracle cards, which will do more than expand the deck -- they change its nature, deepen it, and in a certain way they bring a whole new life to its symbolic language. We're not at the point where we can do readings yet, but I can already feel the new level of interactivity and intrigue they'll bring to kind of storytelling Botanica is best at.
Here's a little sneak preview. The oracle deck has its own unique theme. Does anyone have any guesses what the theme might be? It's a topic that we at our publishing company have a special love for.
Our new project is a wild one. 400 feet worth of flowing folded pageless accordion comics, detailing a saga of intrigue and adventure among the ninja clans of an alternate-history NYC.
Ronald Wimberly originally designed this story for digital presentation as an ongoing downward scroll. To publish it in print, we've remixed it as an insane interactive box set full of ephemera from the GratNin world -- we've got metrocards and maps and furoshikis and trading cards, making up a whole enveloping experience. A world for you to crawl into a skulk around.
GratNin explores gentrification, restorative justice and the transformation of Brooklyn, all with fists flying and kicks jumping. Ron once amusingly described it as "woke Naruto." It's one of our favorite comics ever, and it's our privilege to be able to present it to you in such a unique style.
We're 2/3 of the way to our funding goal, with miles to go before we sleep.
And please do stay tuned -- we have multiple major announcements relating to new Kevin Jay Stanton projects, some Botanica-related and some simply botanical. The best is yet to come.
Wishing you all a spring forward,
The Bees
Finishing BOTANICA Fulfillment!
almost 3 years ago
– Thu, Jun 10, 2021 at 01:16:16 AM
Hello friends!
We're closing in on complete fulfillment of BOTANICA! Thank you all for taking this crazy journey with us.
We've only just begun here. There are more chapters coming in the book of Botanica. But we want to finish this one out with a flourish.
We've now finally shipped all of the A READING tiers, which came directly from Kevin himself and are thus authorized readings from the master Botanist himself. USPS is still moving dreadfully slowly due to the pandemic, so it's no surprise some of the packages are taking a while to get there. If you haven't received your READING package yet, please let us know and we'll figure out a replacement for you.
The last step is still the ENCHANTER editions, but we're getting ready to ship those out now.We finally have all of the supplies including bark, stones, moss, succulents, terrariums, jewel boxes, original paintings, and more. We expect to ship all ENCHANTERS in the next two to three weeks.
Kevin has also created a video showing us how he's assembled how own ENCHANTER terrarium. Of course, this is only one of almost infinite ways you can set up your own terrarium -- the freedom and creativity is half the fun.
Everything Kevin uses here comes with the ENCHANTER package -- we have a very small handful of our original edition of 30 left at beehivebooks.com!
The BOTANICA Jackets have all shipped, and should be arriving this week or next week, if they haven't already. Please note that our manufacturer has a tight time from for returns on the jackets, so if your jacket has any production issues please let us know right away!
Finally, we want to address an issue some of you may have seen popping up in the comments. A small butstill troubling percentage of the decks have been misprinted, or experienced various kinds of damage in packing or shipping. To some degree this is to be expected -- no print run is perfect, and misprinting and damage and unfortunate facts of printing, manufacturing and shipping. However, the scale of the damage and the number of damaged copies is somewhat higher than we normally expect, and we want to be sure to address that fully and transparently.
We remain 100% committed to getting every backer a beautifully produced copy of BOTANICA free of unintended flaws. We've already addressed nearly every extant customer complaint we've received, besides a few that came in in the past week or so we're still catching up to. But we want to urge any backer who received a damaged deck to reach out to us for a replacement.
So, if you think you may have received a misprinted deck, please refer to the digital edition of the deck to see how the art is actually intended to look.
If you believe your deck is damaged or misprinted in any way, please FILL OUT OUR GOOGLE FORM HERE, and we'll be sure to get you a replacement. Please include photos of the damage and your current shipping address for replacements to be sent out around late Summer/early Fall. (If your shipping address is uncertain or looks likely to change, please email us at [email protected] and let us know.)
We're doing a small reprint to stock up on replacement decks, so it may take us a couple of months to get you your replacement deck, depending on how many requests we receive. It's possible it will take until late summer before we can get every replacement out. But rest assured we will see to it that you're taken care of!
Finally, thank you to everyone sharing their readings and uses of the deck via social media, email, or any other way! It fills us up, seeing how Kevin's beautiful work has entered your lives.
It took all of you to make this incredible project possible, and we won't be happy until each and every one of you is proud and pleased with the work we did here. I hope you're all having a beautiful Spring.
And stay tuned. We have a lot of great news coming.
