In the preface to S. W. Erdnase’s classic treatise on “professional” card handling, The Expert at the Card Table (1902), the author suggests that the volume may “inspire the crafty by enlightenment on artifice” and enable someone “skilled in deception to take a post-graduate course in the highest and most artistic branches of his vocation.”1 Stated more clearly, the volume is a practical guide for card cheats.

Erdnase’s identity remains to this day a matter of controversy, but what is certain is that the book’s author knew the world of fin de siècle cardsharping intimately, and had strong opinions about what he had seen.2 The Expert focuses on “card mechanics,” the physical mastery of card manipulation. Shifts, culls, and blind riffles are dealt out in functional detail alongside jogs, slides, and false shuffles. Erdnase sharply contrasts these and other “artifices” with what he condemns as “advantages without dexterity,” examples of which include collusion at the card table, the employment of doctored playing cards, and the use of “hold outs” (cumbersome mechanical gadgets that enable useful cards to find their way secretly into the operator’s hand).

The distinction he draws—between enlightened professionals and artless amateurs, whose “skill, or rather want of it,” requires the use of such inexpert methods—lends the book its sardonic edge, since its rhetoric never fully conceals the fact that no matter how elegantly he might conduct his art, the “professional” is just as much of a crook as his amateur counterpart. If we set aside, however, a hierarchy of deception based on methodological differences and stylistic proclivity, we are free to consider in greater detail one of the “advantages” that Erdnase dismisses and to observe a history of deviousness that, far from wanting in dexterity, simply demonstrates its application in different, if not more subtle, ways.

The history of the marked playing card, perhaps as old as the playing card itself, is a miscellany of inventive guile. “The systems of card-marking are as numerous as they are ingenious,” wrote John Nevil Maskelyne in 1894. “Card doctoring,” to use Erdnase’s term, covers many forms of subterfuge, but in the brief survey that follows, we shall focus our attention upon what might more usefully be termed the “language” of the marked card.

One of the many early documents to describe card marking refers to a system in which cards are divined not by a visible mark but through touch. In his recent commentary on Horatio Galasso’s Giochi di carte bellissimi di regola e di memoria (1593), historian of magic Vanni Bossi describes Galasso’s methods: “The secret involved is the covert marking of cards by nail-nicking or punchwork (using a metal point: un punctal de strenga). … By dealing through the deck, the performer can, with ‘the fleshy tips of the fingers,’ tactilely locate the marked cards without looking at them.”3

The rudimentary punched cards described by Galasso in late sixteenth-century Italy had become les cartes pointées (pricked cards) by the time they were documented by Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin in Les Tricheries des grecs dévoilées in 1863. The term grec (Greek), used as shorthand for “cardsharp,” draws on a long history of prejudice which Robert-Houdin reflects in his description of “Greeks [who] improve on this method by splitting apart the corner of the card, making the puncture from the inner surface, and afterwards pasting the two surfaces together again. In this way, nothing is to be seen but a slight roughness on the back of the card, which, should it ever be remarked, would pass for a mere defect in the card-board.”4

Sometime during the same century, card pricking became further codified in the hands of an enigmatic French card-worker known simply as Charlier.5 The “Charlier system” allowed piquet cards to be read through a sophisticated code of ponctuation (punctuation) set out clearly by Professor Hoffmann, magic’s most influential writer of technical manuals, in More Magic (1890). The Magic Circle in London has in its archives a deck marked by Charlier himself, a personal gift to Hoffmann from the Frenchman, who vanished in London in 1882, never to reappear.6 Nailing and punching (later known also as blistering or pegging) continue, with mixed success, to evade detection to this day, both in the theatrical magic world and general card play.