Conjuring Credits

The Origins of Wonder

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Flourish Cuts Off the Table

The history of two-handed, multiple-packet, flourish cuts with the cards off the table is murky as well as a mouthful. Fancy tabled cuts and one-handed multiple cuts go back well over a century, but such cuts done with two hands, off the table, are newer developments. The earliest published one seems to be Hubert Lambert’s Swivelleroo Cut, which appeared first in The Gen, Vol. 13 No. 8, Dec. 1957, p. 240. (There it is named “Swivelleoo Cut”, a typo later corrected in Dai Vernon's Ultimate Secrets of Card Magic, Lewis Ganson, 1967, p. 229.) It is an elaboration of Nate Leipzig’s Swivel or Twirl Cut (found in Dai Vernon's Tribute to Nate Leipzig by Lewis Ganson, 1963, p. 170).

In the 1970s, David Britland (“Swivelleroo Plus”, Magigram, Vol. 11 No. 7, Jul. 1975, np.), Richard Kaufman and Jon Racherbaumer (“Swivelleroo Plus”, CardMagic, Kaufmann, 1979, p. 28) published variations of the Swivelleroo Cut; and throughout the 1980s similar cuts were published by Herb Zarrow (“Swivel Round-a-bout”, Apocalypse, Vol. 3 No. 6, June 1980, p. 352), Fernando Roman (“Complex-a-Cut”, Apocalypse, Vol. 4 No. 2, Feb. 1981, p. 449), Gianni Mattiolo (“The Repeat Illogical Shuffle”, Opus, Vol. 1 No. 1. Sep. 1987, p. 5), Troy Hooser (“Pendulum False Cut”, Minotaur, Vol. 1 No. 1, Nov. 1988, p. 3) and others. However, it wasn’t until 1992, when Chris Kenner published his Sybil Cuts in Totally Out of Control (pp. 122 & 125), that the genre exploded.