Conjuring Credits

The Origins of Wonder

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Stripper Deck

The Biseauté Pack, using trimmed, tapered cards is today most commonly called a Stripper Deck. This prepared pack was first devised for cheating at gambling. It is recorded in the expanded 1769-70 edition of Gilles-Edme Guyot's Nouvelles récréations, physiques et mathématiques, p. 13 of the unpublished Hugard translation, and William Hooper's Rational recreations, 1802, p. 247 and 262.

By the nineteenth century, the tapered cards had become well established in conjuring literature; e.g., Jean-Nicholas Ponsin's La Magie blanche dévoilée, 1853, p. 149, W. H. Cremer's The Secret Out, 1859, p. 111, Prof. Hoffmann's Modern Magic, 1876, p. 60, August Roterberg's New Era Card Tricks, 1897, p. 55, and Theodore DeLand's manufactured trick decks, such as his Dollar Deck, 1912.