Conjuring Credits

The Origins of Wonder

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Magic Thrust

Lu Brent introduced the plot with his “U-Find-It” effect as part of Five Super Card Mysteries, 1930, np. The addition of using a Charlier pass is Ted Annemann's. Annemann's method first appeared without credit in Burling Hull's Clever Card Collection of 1932, 1932, p. 8.

The same trick appeared in Victor Farelli's Farelli's Card Magic, Volume 2, 1933, p. 95, a year after Clever Card Collection of 1932, with the provisional attribution, “shown to me in Paris by Mr. John Mulholland in May, 1933,” which does not state that Mulholland claimed it. It appears uncredited as “The Magic Thrust” in Glenn Gravatt's Encyclopedia of Self Working Card Tricks, 1936, p. 37. Jean Hugard credits it to Annemann is his Encyclopedia of Card Tricks, 1937, p. 34, as does Hilliard (or Hugard) in Greater Magic, 1938, p. 264. Annemann, to settle the question, explicitly claims the trick in The Jinx, No. 58, July 1939, p. 418, where he states that Mulholland was among the first to whom he showed the trick. (Max Maven located this passage.)

As a side-light, Annemann's Magic Thrust is dealt with oddly by Max Abrams in his excellent Annemann: the Life and Times of a Legend, 1992. Abrams failed to include the trick in his book, although he lists it as Annemann's on page 621, as included in J. G. Thompson's The Living End, 1970, p. 82. It is a curious oversight, but probably nothing more than that.