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Hofzinser Ace Problem
Of the controversial “Hofzinser problems”, the Ace Problem has received by far the most attention. The problems are controversial because there has long been some doubt of their being Johann Nepomuk Hofzinser's ideas. They were first published by Ottokar Fischer in J. N. Hofzinser Kartenkünste, 1910, p. 216. Fischer admits in his introduction to the problems that they are believed to be Hofzinser's, “jedoch authentische Belege fehlen” (however, authentic evidence is lacking).
The Ace Problem is the second presented (see p. 216 above). The text translates as: “Two Aces are placed on the table. One card is drawn and shuffled into the pack. The one Ace disappears and the card drawn appears instead. The same turns back into the second Ace.”
Oddly, this is not the effect that has come to be known as the “Hofzinser Ace Problem”. Instead, the four Aces are shown and set aside. Another card is chosen and returned to the deck. When the Aces are spread, the Ace of matching suit to the selection has changed into that card. To complicate the method, it is said Hofzinser claimed he needn't know the order of the Aces at any time.
This second version of the effect was published by Karl Fulves in Pallbearers Review, Close-up Folio #3 (Winter 1969, p. 299), devoted to Hofzinser's magic. Fulves reported having obtained this variant from a letter by a man named Herrmann to Stanley Jaks, found in a “file” of material once possessed by Jaks (see "Concluding Notes", p. 302 in Folio #3; and Fr. Cyprian on the Hofzinser Card Problem, 1978, p. 14). Fulves mentions the Mulholland and Lund collections in his acknowledgments (two likely repositories for such a file), but both past and recent searches of those collections and elsewhere have failed to find the letter. Magic Christian speculates that the writer might have been a Berlin magic dealer named Max Hermann, or the secretary of the Vienna Magic Club, Heinrich Herrmann.
An earlier report of the four-Ace variant of the problem came from Dai Vernon, who mentioned to several parties his having read it in a letter by either Hofzinser or one of his pupils (two supporting reports are made by Fulves in the Cyprian citation above and Jack Avis in Epilogue, No. 11, Mar. 1971, p. 81). Vernon's recollection of the letter was scant, and he could not recall the circumstances under which he read it in New York. But earlier evidence of his story appears in the introduction to Larry Jennings's “Tell-tale Aces” (a solution to the four-Ace problem) in Dai Vernon's Ultimate Secrets of Card Magic by Lewis Ganson, 1967, p. 49, where Vernon assigns the effect to Hofzinser.
However, the four-Ace version of the effect, replete with a method and with a decorative embellishment, had been published years earlier by Edward Victor. See his “'Deo-Ace' Trick” in Magic of the Hands, 1937, p. 29. Victor makes no mention of Hofzinser.
In assessing the history of this effect, uncertainty is piled on uncertainty, beginning with Fischer's qualification of the certainty of Hofzinser's connection with the proposal of the two-Ace version. We have Vernon's testimony and Fulves's to a letter (or letters) describing the four-Ace variant and attributing it to Hofzinser, but such a letter has disappeared. It may be lost or in a private collection. For further information on the topic, see Magic Christian's assessment in Johann Nepomuk Hofzinser: Non Plus Ultra, Vol. 2, 2013, p. 357.