Waters in The Encyclopedia of Magic and Magicians, p. 227, states that the Mene Tekel Deck was possibly invented by Donald Holmes and not Burling Hull. The method is explained on p. 9 of Holmes's 1913 book Tricks With Prepared Cards. Sam Sharpe in The Magic Circular, Vol. 53, p. 49, says the Mene Tekel Deck, also known as the Self-Shifting Pack, was introduced by Donald Holmes. Bart Whaley's Who's Who in Magic says Hull invented Mene Tekel Deck in 1910.

Reinhard Müller's Marlo on Faked Decks refers to a 1908 Hull Sphinx magazine ad for “The Devil's Pass”. Hugard's Encyclopedia of Card Tricks says it is not certain who devised it but the title Mene Tekel was first supplied by W. D. Le Roy. Le Roy advertised the deck in The Sphinx, April 1910, under the title “Le Roy's Incomprehensible Card Trick”. In Nov. 1915 issue of The Sphinx, in a biographical piece on Hull, it is stated that he invented the Mene Tekel deck at age 11 and called it “The Devil's Pass”. This article also notes that at that time the deck was also called “The Lanigiro Pack”. However, Müller found the deck was created by Friedrich Wilhelm Conradi, who describes it in a Card-at-Any-Number trick, “Mundus Vult Decipi”, in Der Moderne Kartenküstler, 1896, p. 77. The deck was made up of pairs of duplicates, but these pairs were not cut long and short.

Eugene Gloye seems first to have published the idea of a half-deck Mene Tekel bank sandwiched between banks of normal cards. This was in his Linking Ring column, according to Nathan Kranzo in the March 2011 issue of M-U-M (Vol. 100, No. 10, p. 80). Also see two Mene Tekel variants made with normal decks, one by C. A. George Newmann, described in The New Jinx, No. 30, Oct. 1964, p. 126; and a second by North Bigbee, in the same journal, No. 32, Dec. 1964, p. 134.

• Category in Denis Behr's "Conjuring Archive"