The book

The literature of card magic is rich and vast, dating back as far as the 16th century. In the period since that time, various scattered works appeared, mostly in Europe, until the late 1800s. It was during this period that the first real explosion of the subject in print occurred, with the appearance of a number of remarkable books that took the art to new and exciting places.

The most significant of these books — and indeed of any on the topic before or since — was Artifice, Ruse, and Subterfuge at the Card Table: A Treatise on the Science and Art of Manipulating Cards, written and published by S.W. Erdnase in 1902. Since then, the book has become known to all succeeding generations of magicians by its more straightforward moniker, The Expert at the Card Table. Or, simply, Expert. Or “Erdnase.”

Expert generated intense interest for two main reasons. The first was that its author made public for the first time previously hidden secrets of the gambling world; moves and sleights that were actually used at the gaming tables for illicit profit and gain. The second was that the book was adopted as the card magic “bible” by the man who would later become recognized as the greatest sleight-of-hand magician of the 20th century, Dai Vernon.

Although Expert has been reprinted many times, and various editions are today easily and inexpensively purchased, it is estimated that fewer than 200 first editions of the book are known to exist throughout the world. Collectors will easily pay as much as $10,000 for a copy — when and if one comes on the market; an occurrence that happens but a few times in a decade.

And yet despite its significance in the card magic canon and the historical rarity of its original imprints, the book’s celebrity status is enhanced by what is actually the most amazing fact of all about the book: the identity of its author is unknown. The truth is, to this day, over a hundred years after Expert’s publication, no one knows who S.W. Erdanse was.

The issue itself is stranger than fiction: the most important work in its field — a field of closely guarded secrets within an extremely tight-knit fraternity — written by an author whom nobody knew. Much serious research has been done on this subject within the intellectual and historical segments of the magic community, with several candidates having been proposed over the years — and yet none definitively confirmed as the man who wrote the book.

Is this the greatest secret in magic?