The earliest known description of a double-faced card appears in the anonymous work Hocus Pocus - kürtzweilige approbirte Kahrten-Künste, second edition, 1669. Such gaffed cards were easily made at the time, since the backs of playing cards were often blank. Gluing a pip on such a blank-backed card made the construction of a double-faced card simple. The application of the gaffed card, as described in the seventeenth trick of this book (“Das 17. Spiel”), was a simple transformation of a court card, placed under a hat, into an Ace.

See also: Double-Backed Card