In all the time the book has been out, thousands upon thousands of copies have been in circulation, making The Expert a staple of used-book stores as well. There are currently two standard reprint editions on sale, as well as several smaller-run editions available through magic- and gambling-supply houses. Since its first appearance, The Expert has never gone out of print, an astonishing record for any book, let alone a technical treatise on sleight of hand with cards. Erdnase.”Īnd it’s not as if The Expert at the Card Table were some dusty lost text crumbling under glass in a museum. “With magic enjoying unprecedented popularity,” the Erdnase hunter David Alexander wrote recently, “with a tidal wave of magic secrets available to the public as never before through conventions, books, magazines, pamphlets, and videotapes, with secrets exposed on the Internet and on television by Masked Yahoos, one secret has remained sacrosanct: the identity of S. Indeed, in the century since he first self-published The Expert, in Chicago in 1902, the author has eluded the best efforts of researchers, writers, historians, ex-detectives, and magicians to track him down. The book has proved to be one of the great success stories of American publishing, as well as one of its most puzzling mysteries. Īlthough Vernon solved the mystery of the center deal by locating Allen Kennedy, he never did determine the true identity of the author of this bible of card conjuring, which lays out in eloquent detail so many of the fundamental sleights employed by card cheats and magicians alike. At the time, Vernon was 88 and quoting-from memory-a passage he had first read as a boy 80 years before in the book The Expert at the Card Table. Shift, the Professor jumps in, confidently citing the phrase practically word for word. Erdnase about a unique move called the S.
When Steve Freeman, one of Vernon’s most accomplished students, hesitates over a quote from S.
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Most magicians today know Dai Vernon only through his books and from a wonderful series of videos made in 1982 that show him “sessioning” over 17 hours at a card table with three students.