While the idea of secretly buckling the bottom card of a deck or packet did not start appearing in published works until the the early 1930s, the technique was known and used centuries earlier, as has been discovered in an unpublished, anonymous book on conjuring cataloged as “MSS III, 18” in the Biblioteca di Asti, Italy, dated c. 1670-1730. An English translation of much of this work was made by Lori Pieper in the Winter 2013 issue of Gibecière (Vol. 8 No. 1). On page 105 of this translation are two approaches to buckling the bottom card in the context of doing a form of the Glide.

Early descriptions of the Buckle taught using all four fingers or the third or fourth fingers at the side of the deck or packet to accomplish the Buckle of the bottom card. Edward Marlo claimed to have discovered the use of the first finger at the outer right corner for doing the Buckle. He could not have known that in “MSS III, 18” (see above), the anonymous author described a very similar approach, using the second finger near the outer right corner of the deck to buckle the bottom card. The Buckle using the first finger led Marlo to the extension of the Buckle to the Double Buckle and Triple Buckle. See his The Cardician, 1953, p. 102. However, Herb Zarrow also claimed to have come up with the same Double Buckle technique. Given the age of the Buckle and the popularity of the Buckle Count, independent invention was, perhaps, inevitable. However, in the case of Marlo and Zarrow, things were contentious. Zarrow claimed to have shown Marlo the Double Buckle more than a year before The Cardician was published. Long an underground debate, Zarrow's side of the story was eventually told by David Ben in Zarrow (2008, p. 62). For more in defense of Marlo on the issue, see Jon Racherbaumer's essay, “What about the Buckle Count?”, in the April 1992 issue of The Olram File (Vol. 1 No. 11, unpaginated).