The trick of controlling a selection to the bottom of the deck, having someone hold the deck firmly at one end, then knocking the cards from his grasp, leaving him holding only the selection, appears in Edmé-Gilles Guyot's Nouvelles Recreations Physiques et Mathematiques (1740), under the translated title of “A person having drawn a card from a pack, to put the card in his hand and giving the pack a blow to make all the cards fall except that which was drawn.”

It was a favorite trick for authors of the time. It also appeared in Breslaw's Last Legacy (1784), p. 92. A year later it was included in Decremps's Testament de Jérôme Sharpe.

This revelation is also described in Ein Spiel Karten by R. P., Prague, 1853, Part 2, item 8, p. 51 of the Pieper translation, under the title of “The Stubborn Card”.