20: Phantoms of the Card Table: Confessions of a Cardsharp, David Britland & Gazzo

James Randy's book a few weeks ago re-spawned my interest in magic. Some reading on lybrary.com, I think, got me curious about Dai Vernon, which led to S.W. Erdnase's The Expert at the Card Table (which I haven't read yet, because it was slow in coming), and that naturally led to Eddie McGuire and Walter Irving Scott.

So.

This was the first of the books I ordered to arrive, so it got read first. It's a mix of history and biography, telling the Scott-stories of Vernon, McGuire, Cardini, and Gazzo. Was Scott a cardsharp? Who wrote Erdnase? Was Vernon a jerk? Etc. Good reading if you're interested in the subject, but not written well enough to draw in anyone who doesn't care already, I suspect.

The final chapter is a commentary on McGuire's Phantom of the Card Table, the MS in which he published many of Scott's methods. The sleights are not easy.