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Multiple Card Revelation
The first to record the idea of routining a sequence of different card revelations seems to be Professor Hoffmann, who describes a five-card revelation in Tricks with Cards, 1889, p. 206, as an optional prelude in “The Fairy Star”. In this routine, the five cards are found by cutting to the first selection, making the second come to the bottom of the deck, changing a wrong card to the third selection, making the fourth fly to a pocket, and the fifth rise out of the pack.
In 1924, Leopold Figner published a multiple selection routine in his book Offenbarungen aus dem Reiche der Kartenkunst, p. 81, titled “Eine große Anzahl gezogener Karten zum Vorschein zu bringen”. He described a consecutive control of selections using a long card and included an out in case a spectator might take a card from the bank of previously controlled selections. Then he goes on to offer a couple of loosely structured revelations, such as cutting to the card, changing it to the next one, producing it from the body, or revealing it reversed in the deck.
T. Page Wright developed a personal handling and presentation for a five-card revelation, called “The Five Senses”, which was included in Page Wright's Notebook, 1933, p. 47. Wright refers to the core effect as the “old feat of locating a number of drawn cards,” which may allude to the 1889 Hoffmann description or others yet to be discovered.
The next published routine along this line appears to be “Supreme Control” by Edward Victor in Magic of the Hands, 1937, p. 14.
Theodore Annemann published his five-card serial location in the January 1939 issue of The Jinx, No. 52, p. 368, where he wrote: “Eleven years ago [which would be 1928] I evolved a card location routine which, during that time, has served me very well and been taught to but two people. It was after I had seen that incomparable card showman, Maurice, then just a year from France, present his twelve card masterpiece.”
In Genii, Vol. 62 No. 11, Nov. 1999, p. 28, appears an excerpt from a letter from Charlie Miller to Faucett Ross, written on June 16, 1937. In this letter, Miller describes a Multiple Card Location that, according to him, was associated with both Max Malini and Dr. James Elliott. Miller states in his letter, “I suppose that the trick is very old.”
Precursor
A precursor for the idea of locating a number of cards may be found in “The General Card”; see particularly H. Dean's description of this centuries-old trick in The whole art of legerdemain, or, hocus pocus in perfection, 1722, p. 54 of the sixth edition, titled “How to let twenty gentlemen draw twenty cards, and to make one card every man's card.” A version of this trick appeared in an unpublished manuscript known as Sloane 424, c. 1600s, p. 159 of the Pieper translation. The translation was printed in Gibecière, Vol. 5 No. 2, Summer 2010, pg. 141-172.