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GIBECIERE ·
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Jourrna Jou nall of Te Co Con nju jurrin ingg Arts Rese seaarch Cent ? er >
VTCVMQVE NEW YORK MMXV
C C A A R R C C B D William Kalush Dan Smith Philip Varricchio Steve Cuiffo David Blaine D E A B D Dr. David Singmaster E Stephen Minch P William Kalush
Gibecière is
a peer review journal that uses double-blind methodology methodology.. Our group of reviewers is broad and covers all aspects of conjuring and the related arts. Please submit contributions via e-mail at:
[email protected]. sions@conjuringa rts.org. All submissions, unless requested to be returned, will be added to the library at Conjuring Arts Research Center. Gibecière is published semi-annually by Te Conjuring Arts Research Center 11 West West 30th St., St ., 5th Floor, New York, York, NY 10001. Phone: 212-594212-594 -1033 www.conjuringarts.org © 2015 ISSN 1558-8149
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WILSON ON WILSON TYLER WILSON
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, I search of the surprise toys inside. I’d never wait until the trinket naturally fell out on its own. I was impatient. I’d reach my hand deep down into the box to fish through the sugar-frosted heaven until I found my glow-in-the-dark decoder ring. It was nice to have the toy, but I would inevitably leave the cereal tasting hand-y. As a mischievous adult, not much has changed. Te only difference is that I’ve swapped cereal boxes for libraries. I now get my sugar buzz from searching for surprise conjuring texts hidden among the classics. Tese searches are rarely fruitful, as there is a finite number of books on magic, and most have already been thoroughl thoroughlyy researched and studied. studied . However, on a recent lecture tour down the West Coast of the United States, I found an old card-magic booklet in Stanford University’ University’s Cecil H. Green Library. Published in 1877, it is housed in the rare-books special collections. Te title of the booklet piqued my interest because I had never heard of it or its author. Tat didn’t promise much, as many books from the period were simply collections of rehashed material that had been cut and pasted from other books—often word for word. Te booklet at Stanford was only thirty pages long, so I expected to give it a quick skim and be back on the road within minutes. Little did I know that the decoder ring I would find that day would be solid
gold. On the very first page, I was greeted with Erdnasian techniques a full quarter-century before S. W. Erdnase penned his iconic opus. Q V N
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I returned the greeting with the giggles of an excited schoolgirl. Te librarian wasn’t amused. Te booklet is Te 52 Wonders; or Cards Manipulated by Science, by C. H. Wilson. In it, Wilson boasts of sixteen original shifts, eight card tricks, eight short cons (the last item counted as a card trick would be more accurately defined as a ninth short con) and a now common menmental system to name the day of the week for any date. He then slips, in focus and quality, by listing five irrelevant tonic recipes, two math tips and six miscellaneous jokes and tidbits. Tese off-topic inclusions in a work devoted to magic and gambling exposé might look strange today, but the mixture was a common one in previous centuries, in which concon juring was just one of many amusements offered in texts devoted to private entertainment. Te practice was still somewhat common in the nineteenth century. Stephen Minch suggests that Wilson or his printer may have adopted this old habit to fill four pages of the final signature of the booklet, rather than let them go blank. Te boast of sixteen original shifts sounds impressive for 1877 (or 2014). Several entries, though, are merely covers for shifts described earlier in the booklet, and the final shift, the Greenhorn’s Pass, is simply a jest. Regardless, much of the material is notable: Te Long Pass and Short Pass (pp. 3–4/129– 3 –4/129–30) 30)—Tese predate the Longitudinal Shift and S.W.E. Shift, respectively, from Erdnase’s Artifice Ruse and Subterfuge at the Card able (popularly known as Te Expert at the Card able).1 Erdnase adds some s ome fine points to the handlings, but the sleights are in essence the same. Te Monte Pass (p. 12/136)—Tis appears to be the first fi rst time the idea of
using a Hype Move as a shift hit the printed page. Te technique did appear much earlier in an unpublished Italian document commonly 2
called “Te Asti Manuscript”—more formally MMS III, 18, —but G W
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this sleight appears to have lain dormant in published conjuring literature until Wilson W ilson des cribed described in his booklet. 1976, popularity a variation of this control was published byitPaul Harris andIngained with magicians.3 “Te Bonanza B onanza rick” (p. 13/137)—Here we find what may be the earliest record of the effect of mysteriously causing a shuffled deck to arrive in full order (here grouped into fours-of-a-kind rather than sequential runs). It’s a wonderful missing link between the old trick of mixing together the Aces, Kings, Queens and Jacks, before dealing the packet into four piles to find all the values segregated, 4 and 5
Martin Nash’s beloved treatment of Marlo’s “A Matching Routine,” where the entire deck is dealt out in twenty-six pairs, revealing that each pair consists of matched mates. “Te Blindfolded Reading rick” (p. 19/143)—Tis contains a very early, if not seminal, example of the effect of sensing the color of cards by touch alone. Te effect of sensing the identities of cards by touch had been long established by this point, but always to reveal the full identity of a card: suit and value. Wilson appears to be the first to suggest the more subtle approach of only sensing the color. “Te Dummy Bags” (p. 26/150)—Tis entry is notable not for its novelty, novelty6, but for its obscurity. Te scam was detailed in 1716 by Richard Neve, and was all but unheard of until its exhumation in Wilson’ Wilson’s booklet. “Astronomical Calculations” (p. 28/152)—Tis constitutes the whole of Chapter V, and is a method for calculating the day of the week for any date given. (Wilson makes use of this system in an earlier card
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trick, “Te ell-ale rick,” p. 16/140.) His opening sentence for this stunt is unfortunately unfortu nately ambiguous, ambiguo us, as he claims only on ly to “introduce” the “following scientific method.” Does he mean the method is original with him or merely that he is the first to bring it to public attention? attention? Q V
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Tis is an important question, since the first published method for performing this stunt—later called Te Perpetual Calendar or Day for Any Date—is commonly credited to Lewis Carroll, who gave an entirely different method in the March 31, 1887, issue of Nature (vol. 35, no. 909, p. 517). Carroll, in his article, states that he had just come up with the method. Tis firmly places his inventio invention n of a calculation system ten years after Wilson’s. Carroll’s method is also more cumbersome to compute mentally than is Wilson’s.7 Te 52 Wonders raises many questions. Who was C. H. Wilson? What was his full name? Did he author anything else? Are there other
surviving copies of the booklet? Could Erdnase have read it? Could WilWilson be Erdnase? We don’t have much to go on at this early stage, apart from the contents of the booklet itself. Te cover tells us the booklet was self-published in San Francisco, suggesting that Wilson was likely a resident of the city or surrounding area. Inside, the author scatters a few more tantalizing clues about his expertise and experience. He claims not only to have created the shifts he describes, but to have actually used them in card games. Several of these he dates back at least twenty years prior to his writing. His claims to originality are not reliable, as not all his shifts are novel. For example, his Single Short Pass (p. 9/133) previously appeared in several European books.8 Wilson might be forgiven this oversight, due to his living on a continent far from where the technique saw print, although he
hazards annulling that clemency by mentioning his travels to Finland and Herzegovina. He may have learned this pass while abroad, or he may have independently invented it, but in neither case was he the first. Given the overlapping material between Te 52 Wonders and Te Expert at the Card able, there is a temptation to make a connection between their authors. Erdnase’s true identity has long been a subject of investigation G W Q
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and controversy, so it is natural to wonder if Wilson and Erdnase could be the same person. Te idea is as alluring as it is unlikely. Te only solid link between the men is that both lay claim to two of the same techniques. Apart from that, the differences far outweigh the similarities. Te most evident clues are the styles of writing, which are notably dissimilar. Wilson is terse with his descriptions, providing just enough technical detail to get his ideas across. Erdnase Erdnase goes into minutia, often taking pages pag es to break sleights down to their subtle components. Te two voices don’t match any more than mine and Stephen Minch’s during a karaoke duet. Wilson readily admits in his introduction that he has only recently acquired the writing skills necessary to put his techniques to paper.9 Granted, there was a twenty-five-year gap between Te 52 Wonders and Te Expert at the Card able , so it is theoretically possible for Wilson to have honed his writing abilities to those flowing from Erdnase’s pen, but there’s no evidence to support the theory. Te one argument, though, that demonstrates that Wilson and Erdnase were inarguably different people is the contradiction in their ages. If Wilson were Erdnase, he would have had to be at least in his midsixties or seventies while writing Te Expert Exp ert at the Card able. able. Tat goes against the memory of the illustrator of the book, Marshall D. Smith, who described the author as middle-aged.10 Tis is just one of several
inconsistencies between what we know of Wilson and how Smith described Erdnase. If they weren’t the same person, could they have met or known each other? Could Cou ld Erdnase have h ave owned a copy of Wilson’s booklet? booklet ? Erdnase’s Erdnase’s only verifiable location was Chicago, and Te 52 Wonders was self-published across the country, in San Francisco. Stanford’s copy resides in Palo Alto, California, a mere thirty miles from its San Francisco starting Q V N
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point. On its own, this does not suggest a circulation wide enough to reach Chicago; but tracing the provenance of the Stanford copy of Wilson’s booklet could provide crucial evidence needed to put a copy into Erdnase’s hands. Sorry, I just raised your hope for nothing. Stanford’s records show that their copy was donated to the library “many decades ago” by Rosa Kline of the Pauline Schoenberg estate, both women turn-of-thecentury residents of San Francisco.11 Tis might mean Wilson’s work never made it out of the Bay Area. Tere is no way to know with any certainty from that one specimen alone, but neither is there any evidence to the contrary. Sorry, I just crushed your hope for nothing. Shortly before going to print with this issue, Bill Kalush tracked down a second copy of Te 52 Wonders. It is housed in Te University of California’s Bancroft Library at Berkeley. Like Stanford, Berkeley is close to San Francisco. Tis means that neither of the two known copies are now located farther than a thirty-minute thirty-mi nute train journey from f rom the printing house. Again, Again, there is a possibility that Te University of California acquired their copy from donor of across the country. the Bancroft Library has noa record provenance for theUnfortunately, booklet. Could Erdnase have visited or lived in San Francisco? Did he gamgam -
ble against those from the area? Are the two authors unconnected and simply managed to create some of the same techniques independently? Te research is just beginning. What we do know, however, is that Te 52 Wonders deserves a comfortable seat among some of the more intriguing card books over the last la st two hundred years. Offering so much innovative material from a completely unknown author and creator, the booklet is an enigma. And if there is anything life has taught me about solving enigmas, it’s that you need a glow-in-the-dark decoder ring.
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N 1. Chicago: Chicag o: Frederick J. Drake Co., 1902, pp. 130 and 134 respectively. respectively. 2. C. 1700, p. 63 of the Pieper translation. Tis translation was published in Gibecière, vol. 8, no. 1, winter 2013, p. 29–234. 3. See Flip-Flop-Plop in Te Magic of Paul Harris, Jerry Mentzer, 1976, p. 21. 4. See Pablo Pablo Minguet é Yrol’s Yrol’s Engaños a ojos vistas, Madrid: Predro Joseph Alonzo y Padilla, 1733, p. 165 of the Pieper translation, published in Gibecière, vol. 4, no. 2, summer 2009, pp. 61–225. 5. Ovation by Stephen Minch, 1980, Vancouver, Vancouver, B.C., p. 9, and Far Faroo Controlled Cont rolled Miracles by Edward Marlo, Chicago, 1964, pp. 31–33, respectively. 6. A Merry Companion, London: H. racy racy,, 1716, p. 87. 87. Te only on ly other prior appearance of this con I am aware of is in Te Conjuror’s Repository, London: . and R. Hughes, Hughes , 1803, p. 15. 7. In 1800, Carl Friedrich Friedrich Gauss (1777–1855), (1777–1855) , the famed German mathematician, wrote a note in astronomical charts he was studying, in which he gave a method for calculating the day of the week on which January 1 of any year fell. (See http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determination_of_the_day_of_the_week.) Tis method, which is obviously much narrower in its intended purpose, is too cumbersome to be used as a mental-calculation stunt and was not designed as such, which is an important distinction between it and the methods Wilson and Carroll provide. 8. E.g., Decremps, Le testament de Jerome Sharp , Paris, Paris, 1785, p. 153 of the unpublished unpubl ished Hugard translation; Decremps, La nouvelle magie blanche dévoilée, Paris, 1853, p. 30; R. P., Ein Spiel Karten, Prague, 1853, p. 9 of the Pieper translation.
9. Tis provides a clue to Wilson Wilsonss previous education (or deficiency of ) and employ employ ment history. 10. During a phone conversation between Martin Gardner and Marshall D. Smith on December 13, 1946, Smith described Erdnase as being around forty years old, and “not over forty-five. forty-five.”” 11. A real estate transaction with Rosa Kline and Pauline Schoenberg appears in Te San Francisco Call, July 7, 1903, p. 13.
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