Early Card Magic pt.1

The earliest known card tricks in print are found in Giambattista Verini's, Spechio del Mercatāte al. s. el Signor Zan da Marino, Giouabattista Verini Fioretino Libro de Abacho, & Gioco di Memoria printed in 1542. In it, a full deck method for a handling of the Twenty One Card Trick is introduced along with the first known instance of a cyclical stack. This pre-dates what was once believed to have been the earliest card trick in print, that of a card location utilizing the Key Card Principle, found in Girolamo Cardano's 1550 publication of De Subtilitate, by about eight years. However, the fact remains that both these accounts are merely the first printed instances of Card Magic. The first written account of card magic magic dates back to that of a still unpublished manuscript, referred to from here on out as the Perugia manuscript, by Luca Paciolli in 1478.

Stored safely away for close to five hundred years and not to be confused with De Viribus Quantitatis, a collaborative effort between Paciolli and Leonardo Da Vinci at the turn of the 15th century, which also serves as an early example of recorded card magic, Paciolli's unpublished Perugia manuscript introduces a trio of extremely powerful principles of card magic that are still highly relevant today as they were almost six-hundred years ago. In it he details a precursor to the Twenty One Card Trick, the idea of one-way designs as applied to playing cards, and a surprisingly modern method of clocking a pack of playing cards.

So just how relevant are these three principles today? Well, to put it bluntly- very. The mathematical workings of the Twenty One Card Trick laid out within Paciolli's manuscript are directly responsible for initiating youngsters all over the globe into the the world of card magic on an almost daily basis. It's also the reason behind why many serious card workers hold their breath before their inevitable eye roll whenever a muggle says, "Hey, I know a card trick." The impact of one-way designs on playing cards can most readily be seen on full display in the work of Ondrej Psenicka and the global phenomena caused by his Butterfly Playing Cards, while his method of clocking a pack is almost identical to Harry Lorrayne's Epitome Location. A concept that while popularized by individuals like Charles T. Jordan, Karl Fulves, and Lorrayne himself, was taken to new heights by individuals such as Paul Cummins, Hideo Kato, and more recently, Paul Vigil. Though, make no mistake; Paciolli ripped off Harry Lorrayne.

It's important to note that these dates are not to be regarded as definitive, but rather as well-regarded placeholders. With each day that passes these facts and figures lend themselves to being re-discovered, re-examined, and re-written. It's both the blessing and the curse that comes from the endless researching of a craft in the efforts of not only understanding it, but in contextualizing it against an ever-changing landscape of the contemporary. Ultimately, it's because of this that card magic and card tricks, to paraphrase a line from Shakespeare's Hamlet, are to be well used; for they are the abstract and brief chronicles of our time.