XVII
“Patience, and shuffle the cards.”
Miguel de Cervantes—Don Quixote.
From the time the first engraved playing cards were produced, about the middle of the fifteenth century, they have been the favorite implements of the workers of magic tricks. Before that time cards were painted by hand and only the nobility and the very rich could afford to buy them. The discovery of a payment to one Gringonier, a court painter, for painting a pack of cards for the mad king Charles of France gave rise to the foolish legend, still current, that cards were invented for the amusement of a madman. The art of engraving brought cards into the hands of the common people, and so rapidly did the magicians—jongleurs, as they were then called—adapt them to their purposes that the curious reader will find in Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1586) a clear description of some of the sleights used by skilled card performers of today, who little know to whom they are indebted for them.
Of recent years there has been a great advance in the art of manipulating cards, mainly in the direction of simplicity and subtlety as against the use of difficult sleights. For example, the textbooks place great stress on the absolute necessity for making the pass, a sleight whereby the halves of the pack are righted after a cut has been made. This is an extremely difficult sleight and, being faced with it at the outset, many would-be card tricksters give up the struggle and turn to some other branch of the art which appears to be less difficult. The fact is, however, that the basic sleights with cards are easy and anyone who can make the regular overhand and riffle shuffles can with very little trouble master a large number of the best card tricks. The simplified methods of today are in great part a reversion to those in use in Scot’s time as the following quotation from his book proves:
“But in showing feats and juggling with cards the principall point consisteth in shuffling them nimblie and alwaies keeping one certain card in the bottome or in some knowne place in the stock foure or five cards from it. Hereby you shall seeme to worke wonders . . . in reserving the bottome card you must alwaies (whilest you shuffle) keepe him a little before or a little behind all the other cards lieing beneath him.”
This last is nothing more nor less than the so-called modern “jog,” one of the best weapons in the armory of the up-to-date card man.
The essential sleights in card conjuring are few in number and if the student will follow the descriptions with the cards in hand and apply a little intelligent practice to them he will have no difficulty in mastering the tricks dependent on them.
I. SHUFFLES
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