The mathematical principle behind the “Smith Myth,” is now most commonly referred to as the Transposed Cards Principle. The foundation for this principle, which depends on the reversing of part or all of the deck, dates back to a card trick described in some of the earliest texts on conjuring secrets, such as the 1755 edition of Pablo Minguet's classic, Engaños a ojos vistas (see “Trick for Guessing the Card from a Deck that Someone Else Has Thought of”, p. 174 of the Pieper translation in Gibecière, Vol. 4, No. 2, Summer 2009). Professor Hoffmann, in Modern Magic (1876, p. 52), provides two handlings of this trick in “To Allow a Person to Think of a Card, and To Make that Card Appear at Such Number in the Pack as Another Person Shall Name”. A bit more modern application was given by Walter Gibson with “The Transposed Cards” in Popular Card Tricks (1928, p. 9). One of the most influential applications of the principle in the twentieth century was Fred Smith's “Smith Myth” in Hen Fetsch's The Five-o-Fetsch (1956, p. 7).} It has been explored by Stewart James, Sidney Lawrence, Nick Trost, Phil Goldstein and others. Another rudimentary form of the principle is active in a trick called “Mentalo” in Encyclopedia of Card Tricks (Hugard edition), p. 177. This trick may originally have come from a work titled 40 Best Pocket Tricks. Checking Potter, the closest title seems to be Forty Tricks with Cards, dated 1914. This must be checked.

• Category in Denis Behr's "Conjuring Archive"