J. G. Thompson, Jr. published the idea of tapping the deck on one corner to cause a corner-shorted card to jog from the edge as a method of locating a reversed card in “A Super Strip Deck”, a deck in which one corner of all cards is cut short (see also Corner-Shorted Deck). It is the sixth method of locating the card in The Linking Ring, Vol. 23 No. 8, Oct. 1943, p. 46.
In The Patented Shuffle, 1964, p. 10 of the section “I Shuffled the Cards”, Marlo applied the principle to a “Marlo Short Card”, which is a card with a one-sided stripper cut. Vernon published the idea again (with a traditional corner-shorted card) in Ganson's Dai Vernon's Ultimate Secrets of Card Magic, 1967, p. 150. It was explained in more detail in The Vernon Chronicles, Vol. 1, 1987, p. 2, in which Vernon said he had learned the idea from a gambler in San Francisco.