Conjuring Credits

The Origins of Wonder

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Early Card Fakery

In Olivier Gouyn de Poictiers' work, Le mespris et contennement de tour jeux de sorts, 1550, he describes wide and short cards, marked cards, false shuffles and deals, nullifying the cut and deck switches. See Fanch Guillemin's An Illustrated History of White Magic, 2002, p.99. Horizontally split faces were in use as far back as S. Rid's The Art of Jugling or Legerdemaine, 1612, n.p. And in Jaques Ozanam's Récréations Mathématiques et Physiques, 1694, p. 112 of the Pieper translation, diagonally divided faces and the color-changing card with flap are described and illustrated. Ozanam's book was translated in Gibecière, Vol.6 No.1, Winter 2011, p. 79-156. See the Acrobatic Card Feke entry.