Riffling the end of a deck to make a miniature of a selected card pop up is credited to Sid Lorraine, who contributed it to the Mar. 1928 issue of The Linking Ring, Vol. 8 No. 1, p. 33, under the title “A Novel Card Discovery”. A variation of the idea, using a jumbo deck and a half card, was published with no attribution in Jumbo Card Tricks by Percy Abbott in 1936, p. 6.

The use of a half card in a normal-sized deck was presented as “Joe Berg's Flip-up Card” in the Tarbell Course in Magic, Volume 4, 1945, p. 122. In The Card Magic of Le Paul, 1949, p. 161, Le Paul used the principle to produce a card with one quarter missing. In Genii, Vol. 69 No. 4, Apr. 2006, p. 67, Arthur Trace turns Le Paul's idea around to produce a quarter of card.