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Interlocked Card Production
The first methods for producing playing cards while the fingers of the hands are interlocked—that is, meshed or interlaced—were devised by Cliff Green and Tenkai. Green gives a good history of the sleight in Cliff Green's Professional Card Magic, 1961, p. 122. Green states his inspiration was the production of a billiard ball while the fingers are interlaced, which he saw done in the 1910s by Carl Felsman, then half of the duo Felsman and Arthur, with his brother, the later Chicago magic dealer, Arthur Felsman. Green later learned that this ball production was Arnold de Biere's. De Biere's production, or one very like it, was published in 1914 by Burling Hull in Master Sleights with Billiard Balls, p. 21. Hull was not aware of the originator of the sleight.
Green, in the mid-1920s, found Tenkai and his wife Okinu were doing interlocked card productions in their U.S. appearances. Tenkai's method was different from Green's; a case of parallel invention. Tenkai's method was described in Hugard and Braue's Expert Card Technique, 1940, p. 159 (of the 1950 third ed.), but through a misunderstanding, explained by Green in his book, Green was credited with Tenkai's handling. Dai Vernon was later to explain his approach to Tenkai's technique, and an added idea by Bob Hummer in Dai Vernon's Inner Secrets of Card Magic by Lewis Ganson, 1959, p. 57.
Green eventually explained his own handling in his book (p. 123), where he also mentions that Joseph Cottone published a method related to Green's in a 1946 monograph, Continuous Card Production. Victor Sendax made improvements to Cottone's handling, and Green explained “The Cottone-Sendax Method” in his book (p. 128). Some inaccuracies in Green's description and the accompanying drawings were corrected by Richard Kaufman and Harry Lorayne in Apocalypse, Vol. 1 No. 6, Jun. 1978, p. 62.
Other notable handlings are Channing Pollock's in The New Phoenix, No. 133, Aug. 6, 1954, p. 53; and Jeff Sheridan's in Genii, Vol. 62 No. 7, Jul. 1999, p. 51, and Vol. 62 No. 9, Sep. 1999, p. 49. Other worthwhile works on the topic are Earl Ray Wilcox's Inter-lock with Cards and Coins, 1966; and Mariano Palhina's Interlocked Card Production, 1978.