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Twenty-one Card Trick
The first known description of this trick, done with a full fifty-two-card deck dealt into four piles, appears in Giambattista Verini's 1542 book Spechio del mercatate; see pp. 48-51 of Riccardo Rampini's English translation in Gibecière, Vol. 17 No. 1, Winter 2022. Verini titled the trick: “To make a beautiful game of divining cards, being the cards all in one pile, and saying to someone: Divine which card you want to have chosen that I will be able to tell you.” Before this point, the Redistribution Principle underlying the effect had been used with other objects than playing cards.
A version more closely resembling the common twenty-one-card form but using just fifteen playing cards dealt into three piles appeared in Horatio Galasso's Giochi di Carte Bellissimi di Regola, e di Memoria, 1593, p. 49-51 of the English translation by Lori Pieper. This translation was published in Gibecière, Vol. 2 No. 2, Summer 2007, p. 15-150. The title of the trick translates as “How to have someone think of a card and guess what it is.”
An interesting extension on this very old principle is found in Edmé-Gilles Guyot's Nouvelles Recreations Physiques et Mathematiques, 1769, p. 46 of the Hugard translation, under the title of “A person having secretly thought of a card to make it be found at the number demanded.” It details a system to deliver a card thought of to any named position in a deck of 27 cards, by means of dealing the entire deck into face-up piles several times, each time gathering the piles in a specific sequence formulated to position the thought-of card at the chosen location. This was later published with a fifty-two-card deck by Charles Jordan as “The 52-Card Trick”, first advertised in The Sphinx, Vol. 18 No. 10, Dec. 1919, p. 264. (See also in Karl Fulves's Charles T. Jordan: Collected Tricks, 1975, p. 62.)
The principle of redistribution upon which this trick relies is shared with other card divinations, particularly Mutus, Dedit, Nomen, Cocis and the Matrix Card Divination.
See also: The Redistribution Principle.