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BookOfCardTricks

The provenance of every page

Sources & Credits

Card magic is a long conversation between generations of inventors. Here is the literature we build on, how we treat it, and the rights status of each work.

Catalog entry

The Encyclopedia of Card Tricks

Glenn Gravatt (compiler) · Jean Hugard (reviser/editor) · John J. Crimmins, Jr. (associate editor)

Likely public domain
Year
1937
Edition
Original typescript compilation, later revised
Publisher
Max Holden / later Dover
Extent
≈403 pp, 733 entries across 20 chapters

Every trick on BookOfCardTricks is adapted and rewritten in our own teaching language from this classic compilation, with credits preserved where the original named an inventor. The 1937 compilation is old enough to be very likely public domain in the United States; modern Dover reprints add editorial material that we do not reproduce. We teach methods in original words and draw original diagrams.

How we handle the material

Our editorial stance

We are students of these tricks before we are publishers of them. Nothing here is a scan or a copy-paste. Every effect is studied from the classic literature and then rewritten from scratch in our own teaching language — the order of operations, the patter, the little nudges that make a move land. If a sentence reads well on this site, it is because someone here wrote it, not because it was lifted from a seventy-year-old page.

We credit inventors wherever the original record names them. Card magic is built on borrowed ideas, but a borrowed idea still has an author, and saying their name is the least we owe them. When a trick's origin is genuinely unknown — as much of the old folk material is — we say that too, rather than quietly claiming it.

All of our illustrations are original. The engraved plates and deck-state diagrams you see are drawn here, from the method up, so that the picture teaches the trick rather than merely decorating it. We do not reuse artwork from modern editions.

Methods live behind a Learn Mode gate on purpose. Public pages show you the effect, the difficulty, the props, and the source — everything you need to decide whether to learn a trick — while the secret itself waits for a deliberate click. That keeps a careless scroll from spoiling a piece of magic for the next person, and it respects the long tradition of guarding a working.

We stay on classic, public-domain ground. We focus on material old enough to belong to everyone, avoid modern proprietary effects, and frame anything touching gambling as history and performance rather than instruction for cheating. We are not in the business of “exposing secrets” — we teach an old art with respect for the people who made it and the performers who still keep it alive.

This page describes our practice and is not legal advice. If you believe something here misattributes a trick or uses protected material, we want to hear about it.