Description of The Book
Despite his widespread influence on the magician community, the author's identity remains an unsolved mystery. (See Gardner's Foreword, pp. vii-ix.)
Originally the author started selling the book for $2.00 in 1902 and the next year it dropped to $1.00 and he sold the rights. Although the author did not renew the copyright, the book has remained in print since 1902, albeit small private printings on occasion. The influence of this book is such that it has been issued in annotated form; translated into Japanese, German, Spanish, French, and Italian; and issued as a series of DVDs by a professional magician, demonstrating and explaining Erdnase's techniques and methods. Among numerous demonstrations of techniques described in the book, the most comprehensive reviews of the sleight of hands are the same-titled DVDs published by Allan Ackerman, Wesley James, R. Paul Wilson and Revelations series of Dai Vernon. A featured show of the story of Expert of the Card Table is also performed regularly by UK magician Guy Hollingworth.
"The Professor" (Dai Vernon) is credited with popularizing this influential text in the community of professional magicians. Well past ninety years of age, Vernon was fond of quoting from it, with page numbers, when discussing card techniques with his colleagues at the Magic Castle.
In Expert Card Technique, Jean Hugard said of it, "... perhaps no other book in all the list of conjuring books has been so avidly read, so affectionately regarded." Erdnase's glossary of terms was in itself extremely influential, and has been reproduced more or less directly by numerous authors, including Hugard, and Henry Hay.
The book is divided into sections. Each section describes individual card manipulation techniques. This article will describe the sections in précis form.
Read more about this topic: The Expert At The Card Table
Famous quotes containing the words description of the, description of, description and/or book:
“The next Augustan age will dawn on the other side of the Atlantic. There will, perhaps, be a Thucydides at Boston, a Xenophon at New York, and, in time, a Virgil at Mexico, and a Newton at Peru. At last, some curious traveller from Lima will visit England and give a description of the ruins of St. Paul’s, like the editions of Balbec and Palmyra.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A sound mind in a sound body, is a short, but full description of a happy state in this World: he that has these two, has little more to wish for; and he that wants either of them, will be little the better for anything else.”
—John Locke (1632–1704)
“many an eye that all its age had drawn its
Beam from a Book ...”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)