A deck with a single corner shorted was described in a Boston newspaper, Flag of Our Union, on Dec. 22, 1866; and three years later in the anonymous book The Black Art or Magic Made Easy, 1869, Frederic A Brady, New York: “To Produce a Particular Card without Seeing the Pack,” p. 7. It is later described by Professor Kunard in The Book of Card Tricks, 1888, p. 64. The idea didn't gain traction.

It reared its head again in the twentieth century. In a letter dated March 22, 1924, T. Nelson Downs wrote to Edward McGuire, “Not a bad effect with the shaved card – the shaved card IDEA is that ALL the cards are shaved – all alike in one corner only – no Force – the card is freely chosen & reversed in its return to pack. You turn the pack if party selecting card does not turn his card. The card can be located & passed to any position by aid of this edge work…” (See The Linking Ring, Vol. 51 No. 4, Apr. 1971, p. 73.) This is a description of the same corner-shorted deck that Kunard and others before him described, and it would later be reinvented yet again by J. G. Thompson, Jr., as “A Super Strip Deck,” published in The Linking Ring, Vol. 23 No. 8, Oct. 1943, p. 46.

In 1914, Ellis Stanyon published a description of gaffed decks in which corner-shorted cards are proposed as an alternative to short cards in Mene Tekel and Svengali Decks; see Magic, Vol. 14 No. 6, Mar. 1914, p. 58.

The idea of trimming a corner of just one card in the deck, for use as a locator, seems to have come along sometime after the corner-shortening of a full deck and of alternating cards. Prior to trimming the corner to create of locator card came the idea of softening the corner. The first known description of this idea appears in Louis Nikola's Nikola Card System, 1927, p. 12. Theodore Annemann mentions the corner-short in Sh-h----! It's a Secret, 1934, p. 32; and both the broken or softened corner and shorted corner in the Jinx Summer Extra 1935, pp. 39 and 44. Annemann's mentions of the prepared card are casual, giving an impression that he presumed the idea was known to his readers. Despite these implications, judging by the literature, corner-shorted cards seem to have been little recognized by magicians until uses of them were explained in John Northern Hilliard's Greater Magic, 1938, p. 517; and George Kaplan's Fine Art of Magic, 1948, p. 4.