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Richard Kaufman
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Re: Erdnase

Postby Richard Kaufman » March 16th, 2010, 7:37 pm

Probably some amateur magician with a sense of humor.
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Re: Erdnase

Postby Don Knox » March 16th, 2010, 7:59 pm

Richard Kaufman wrote:Probably some amateur magician with a sense of humor.


And a great sense of smell, too!

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Jonathan Townsend » March 16th, 2010, 8:40 pm

Mundus vult decipi -per Caleb Carr's story Killing Time

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Richard Kaufman » March 16th, 2010, 9:00 pm

And what's your point Jonathan--if you've looked at the document to which you've linked you'll see the name S.W. Erdnase in the left-hand column, 4th line, p.117. That's what Bill said. Does the link tell you or anyone else anything? No.
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Re: Erdnase

Postby Jonathan Townsend » March 16th, 2010, 9:13 pm

Richard Kaufman wrote:And what's your point Jonathan--if you've looked at the document to which you've linked you'll see the name S.W. Erdnase in the left-hand column, 4th line, p.117. That's what Bill said. Does the link tell you or anyone else anything? No.


Sorry, I got stuck between asking if it might have been a typo and frustrated at being unable to grab the page for direct inclusion and abandoned the post (and it posted).

I wanted the image to ask if it's legit compared to a physical copy anyone here might have and then to ask if any of the other names attending were known to be magicians.
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Reason: provenence or providence of Tlon? Not so silly a question anymore.

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Jim Martin » March 16th, 2010, 10:09 pm

Richard Kaufman wrote:And what's your point Jonathan--if you've looked at the document to which you've linked you'll see the name S.W. Erdnase in the left-hand column, 4th line, p.117. That's what Bill said. Does the link tell you or anyone else anything? No.

Actually, it appears to read 'S.W. Erdnose'. (I expanded the font size - either a typo or an '-ose').
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Re: Erdnase

Postby Richard Kaufman » March 16th, 2010, 11:24 pm

Of course it's legit! Do you think Google just happened to scan a copy of some obscure journal that had been doctored? That's just bizarre.
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Re: Erdnase

Postby John Bodine » March 17th, 2010, 12:46 pm

Jonathan's inquiry as to whether or not other magicians are mentioned is a valid direction to pursue. i would also add it would be worth looking at names who might have been associated with Todd Karr's candidate or perhaps known gamblers of the time/place.

As for legit, i think Jonathan was referring to the scan/OCR, asking to compare it to a paper copy to see if the OCR accurately captured the letters. Easy to make mistakes with that technology.

Nice digging Bill!

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Larry Horowitz » March 17th, 2010, 3:25 pm

Richard,

While anything is possible, I would find it odd that a magician would make a joke with the name when the book was only recently published and not yet a major influence. Nor for that matter do I think the matter of the identity of the author had risen to the point where the joke would get traction.

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Dustin Stinett » March 17th, 2010, 3:56 pm

Erdnase was already well-known in magic in 1908. It had been being advertised in The Sphinx for quite a while by then. I'm guessing that the common notion that The Professor somehow "introduced" the book to magic might be at work here. That is not the case at all. He did, however, stress its importance.

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Bill Mullins » March 17th, 2010, 4:28 pm

Jonathan Townsend wrote: Sorry, I got stuck . . .at being unable to grab the page for direct inclusion . . .
I wanted the image to ask if it's legit compared to a physical copy anyone here might have and then to ask if any of the other names attending were known to be magicians.


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Re: Erdnase

Postby Magic Newswire » March 17th, 2010, 8:51 pm

Erdnose is an anagram for Red Nose. I wonder if his real name was Rudolf? ;-) Sorry, I could not help myself.

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Richard Evans » March 17th, 2010, 9:24 pm

Interesting find, Bill.

The article in The Caledonian is an account of a dinner held by the Canadian Club of New York. Have a look at the constitution and membership of that club in 1885:

http://www.archive.org/details/cihm_00430

Members include one Saram R Ellison MD, founder of the SAM.

Then take a look at Article VI of the constitution.

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Richard Kaufman » March 17th, 2010, 9:50 pm

Dr. Ellison, eh? That's interesting.

By the by, David Alexander's candidate for Erdnase had something to do with the nose in the hidden meaning. "S.W. Erdnose" is possibly a typo. Or not.
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Re: Erdnase

Postby David Alexander » March 18th, 2010, 12:39 am

Pointed out originally (I believe) by Thomas Sawyer in a privately printed monograph, in German "Erd Nase" means "earth nose." My candidate was a mining engineer who graduated from the Columbia School of Mines. He studied German and Latin.

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Re: Erdnase

Postby magicam » March 18th, 2010, 2:43 am

Feeling lazy. If either of these were previously posted, my apologies. Go to the web page in question to see all the web links embedded in the relevant article.

From http://blogs.knoxnews.com/silence/archi ... in_1.shtml:

Saturday Morning Mystery: Who Was S. W. Erdnase?

Published in 1902, The Expert at the Card Table is apparently the classic text on card manipulation, also known as cheating. The author wrote under the pseudonym of S.W. Erdnase. A hundred years later people are still searching for his true identity.

Erdnase is such as awkward false name that it seems reasonable to guess that it's a reversal or some other anagram of the author's true name. The Wikipedia entry names Franklin Andrews and Wilbur Edgerton Sanders as candidates for being Erdnase, and ends with this teaser:

Research for an upcoming documentary has uncovered correspondence between noted physicists and authors Stanley Wesley Stratton and Robert Andrews Millikan on the subject of conjuring and crooked gambling. In 1896 Stratton suggested a textbook on the subject. Further evidence suggests that Millikan and Stratton hired Professor Hoffman to write the book based (partly) on notes they provided.
An August 16, 2000 Wall Street Journal article by Rachel Emma Silverman, "Into Thin Air: Writer Reveals Magic Tricks, Then He Disappears" gave popular coverage to Erdnase. I don't have access to the article, but summaries say it mentions Erdnase candidate Wilbur Edgerton Sanders, as well as a James Andrews and an Edwin Sumner Andrews.


Todd Karr has much more information about what is known and what is supposed about Erdnase. He offers his own best guess as to the author's true identity:

On November 23, 1901, shortly before the publication of The Expert at the Card Table, the Fort Wayne News reported on a scam perpetrated in Kokomo by A stranger giving his name as E. S. Andrews of the Brandon Commercial Company, Chicago? The news report stated that the con man had a clever collections-agency scheme that succeeded in bilking forty local merchants and physicians.
Andrews had come to Kokomo three weeks prior and convinced the businessmen and doctors to hire him to collect their debts. Each participant paid Andrews a membership fee of $15 (or about $900 total). The newspaper reported that Before leaving, Andrews collected several accounts from debtors, all of which he took with him, the merchants or physicians receiving nothing.


We thus have a candidate whose name is a precise reversal of the pseudonym S. W. Erdnase, a con man based in Chicago who was clever enough to swindle businessmen and doctors, and someone who appears to have had over $900 in his pocket just before The Expert at the Card Table was published.

Another article lists several candidates, and claims that "erdnase" would translate to "earth nose" in German. That could be a clue pointing towards mining engineer Wilbur Edgerton Sanders, though it seems like a bit of a stretch.

Posted by Les Jones on February 3, 2007 at 1:14 PM


From http://www.eogn.com/archives/news0035.htm (scroll down a bit):

- Whatever Happened to S.W. Erdnase?

When poring through old records in search of your ancestors, you might keep an eye open for a few more names. S.W. Erdnase has been missing for a long time. Professional and amateur magicians alike will quickly recognize the name of S.W. Erdnase. In 1902, he published a book called, "The Expert at the Card Table." In vivid detail and elegant prose, the book revealed the secrets behind intricate card tricks and quick-fingered cheating techniques.

Erdnase obviously was a pseudonym, one that has never been revealed. Erdnase never made public appearances and never wrote another book - at least not under that name. Yet for nearly 100 years, the book has never vanished from print. It has sold hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide and been translated into many other languages. It has become the bible of card magic.

Now the search for Erdnase is heating up. Earlier this year, Steve Pepoon of Chatsworth, Calif., paid $10,259 in an eBay auction for a first edition of the "Expert" signed by its illustrator. The auction also included some of the illustrator's letters, which contained clues to the identity of Erdnase. "Everyone loves a good mystery," says the 44-year-old television scriptwriter and amateur magician. The sale made a splash inside the world of magic and ignited a new wave of Erdnase research.

S.W. Erdnase was almost certainly a pen name. But for whom? Conferences, books, magazine articles and monographs have all attempted to unmask Erdnase. Every Erdnase hunter has his own pet theory. Some believe the author was someone named "E.S. Andrews" - the name spelled backward. Magicians trawling census records, magician-society membership rosters, and other documents have yet to find an E.S. Andrews with deep card knowledge and the education necessary to write such an articulate book. Then there's the question of whether such a clever master of deception would succumb to something so obvious as the old backward-name trick.

The pioneer of Erdnase research is Martin Gardner, an 85-year-old author and mathematics columnist. He began in 1946 by interviewing Marshall D. Smith, the book's illustrator. Unfortunately, the artist remembered very little about Erdnase, whom he had last seen in 1901. But the details he did remember remain the key clues for Erdnase hunters. According to Mr. Smith, Erdnase was a handsome, well-bred East Coast man with unusually soft, well-pampered hands. He was about 5 feet 6 inches tall and about 40 years old. The illustrator couldn't remember the author's name but thought it might have been Andrews. The author also claimed to be related to Louis Dalrymple, a popular turn-of-the-century cartoonist, according to the illustrator.

Mr. Gardner corresponded with other magicians who said they had known Erdnase, conducted lengthy archival research, and by 1949 believed he had cracked the case. Erdnase, he claimed, was a man named Milton Franklin Andrews, found dead in 1905 following a grisly murder-suicide in a San Francisco apartment. In many ways, Mr. Andrews seemed a good fit. A well-bred, East Coast gambler, he died soon after the book's publication - providing a nice explanation for the silence surrounding the author. But Mr. Andrews was also much taller than the man Mr. Smith recalled. And an 18-page letter written by Mr. Andrews and found after his death was nowhere near as eloquent as "The Expert."

Some professional magicians refuse to believe that a murderer penned the card-trick masterpiece. That notion helped spur another theory: that the book was ghostwritten, perhaps by Mark Twain, a childhood chum of Mr. Andrews in Hartford, Conn.

Mr. Hatch, who brokered the eBay sale, thinks E.S. Andrews might be short for James Andrews and is investigating a man with that name. He also is focusing on another candidate, a railroad worker named Edwin Sumner Andrews, whose wife shared Louis Dalrymple's mother's maiden name of Seeley. The book dealer spends at least two hours a day searching magic-society archives, census records, Library of Congress authorship lists, and genealogy Web sites for men named Andrews who fit the author's profile. Earlier this summer, he spent several days of his family vacation digging through the genealogical archives in Salt Lake City. However, Hatch still has not located the proof that he seeks.

David Alexander has approached the Erdnase puzzle another way. Last winter, the magician and former private detective from Long Beach, Calif., assembled a "forensic profile" of the type of man who might have written the book, then conducted a complex linguistic analysis of the book's title page. He thinks S.W. Erdnase was really W.E. Sanders. Alexander came to that conclusion by studying the book itself. One Erdnase trick was a card shift called the "S.W.E. Shift," named for his initials. A shift is a furtive card action in which top cards are moved to the bottom of the deck. Performing a "shift" on the initials S.W.E. results in W.E.S.

Mr. Alexander's search through Library of Congress records and census reports turned up an Erdnase contender named Wilbur Edgerton Sanders. Mr. Sanders, a mining engineer born in Akron, Ohio, in 1861 but educated at Philips Exeter Academy, fits the profile. (In German, "Erdnase" means "earth-nose," which Mr. Alexander deems significant.) Mr. Alexander is currently reading Mr. Sanders's diaries, dated from 1875 to 1890, and believes the writing style is similar to that of Erdnase. The diaries are filled with mundane details of 19th-century life, including meals, chores and family relations, and so far make no mention of card tricks. But that, too, could be a ruse. The best tricks, after all, are those that are never revealed.

When researching old census records, death records or other sources of genealogy information, keep an eye open for a 5 foot 6 inch magician born around 1860.

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Bob Coyne » March 18th, 2010, 6:24 pm

That's a great discovery Bill...and right there on the internet too!

Regarding David Alexander's candidate (WIlbur Edgerton Sanders), here's an interesting google books link I just found to the 25th anniversary yearbook of the Columbia School of Mines. Sanders was deemed the unofficial class poet and historian and wrote retrospective poems and bios about his classmates (including himself) in the yearbook. I didn't find any smoking guns to connect him with Erdnase, but there were a couple of intriguing references. In particular here's part of a poem Sanders wrote about a classmate Johnson who was at the time (1910) producing shells for warfare, but which Sanders puns to mean the shell game and in the process mentions faro and poker and cheating.

Come, Johnson, cease your naughty ways,
Make simple faro, poker plays
Or roulette e'en, but stop this craze
For playin' the "Shell game."

However, Johnson, when I learn
The shell game played by your concern
Is not the western game I yearn
To see played on the square,
[...]

There's also an interesting part where Sanders refers to himself (who he calls "Billy Sanders") with a continuing refrain of "Bill, yer kaint fule me" (you can't fool me). The context isn't magic but "kaint fule me" = "can't fool me" is suggestive of it.

"It sufficeth to say that only the innate and in(co)herent modesty of the objective subject of this "story of a life" prevents the Class Historian (officiallywhen writing of Billy Sanders) from dealing in higher superlatives than these hereinafter detailed, specified and contained, to wit: lie air young an' beautifullest an' fair; he hez carroty face an' a freckled hair; he seems pure an' nobil ez he kin bebut, nixkumarouse, Bill, yer kaint fule me ! He hez wondrous grace in hiz nether pegs, when he pir-hoo-etts on hiz rear hind legs: an' he thinks he's sum with hiz hullaballoo; but he kaint fule meknow him throo an' throo! He hez tears in hiz eyes when he talks uv him; what he sez uv him, sure it ain't so slim; but 1 sez ter him, with hiz reinekaboo, naow yer kaint fule meso yer jess gaow tew ! An' ter h'ar him talk uv ther pace he's set; an' uv what he's done, fer he's braggin' yet; what a bad man he, an' so Woolly! Gee!but I know yer, Bill, an' yer kaint fule me!"

http://books.google.com/books?id=pURGAA ... 22&f=false

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Bill Mullins » March 19th, 2010, 2:31 pm

Bob Coyne wrote:Regarding David Alexander's candidate (WIlbur Edgerton Sanders), here's an interesting google books link I just found to the 25th anniversary yearbook of the Columbia School of Mines.


I had found this book a couple of weeks ago, and forwarded the link to David Alexander. I was "sitting on" the info until after next week, when I'm giving a short presentation "Martin Gardner and the Search for Erdnase" at the 9th Gathering for Gardner.

One comment on the book: Sanders gives his height in his autobiographical sketch as 5'9". This is somewhat higher than Marshall Smith remembered Erdnase as being.

Also, I've found Sanders' passport application from 1918. It includes his signature, which doesn't look like the handwriting on the copyright application for Expert. Of course, that doesn't prove anything, since the application could have been filled out by someone at McKinney, who printed the book, and whose address Erdnase gave on the copyright application.

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Bill Mullins » March 19th, 2010, 2:49 pm

Also, the passport application says that Sanders had a crooked little finger on his left hand. If it could be shown that this was congenital, or from an accident before 1902, I would think this would almost conclusively rule out W. E. Sanders as the author. Smith didn't remember it, nor does it show up in the illustrations in the book. Of course, it could have happened after 1902. The only picture I've seen of Sanders' hand is the one in Alexander's article in Genii Jan 2000, which is inconclusive. The finger doesn't appear bent, but it is separate from the rest of the hand. Perhaps the original photo has more detail.

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Bob Coyne » March 19th, 2010, 4:40 pm

Interesting about Sanders having a crooked finger on his left hand. I wonder if he got caught cheating and someone performed the appropriate punishment :-)

Regarding Sander's height, in addition to the 5'9 that he gives here, there's also the fact that he was the bow on the Columbia crew team. Bowmen tend to be the smallest/slightest of the rowers in the boat. So it at least seems compatible with Smith's recollections.

I found some other miscellaneous info about Sanders from the "The Miner" yearbooks in the 1880's when he was enrolled as a student (I don't think these aren't available on the internet yet). There were a few peripheral references to poker type things (eg. a poker club), but nothing tying any of them to Sanders. There was also in one of them a short parody "extract" of the Odyssey with "crafty Ulysses" dealing a game of five card draw poker to Penelope and Telemachus. Ulysses wins of course :-) Given Sanders' literary bent it seems possible he wrote it, but the attribution I think was "B.W." which I guess could match Billy Wilbur (since he seems to refer to himself as Billy) though perhaps that's a stretch.

I've been meaning to look at more stuff in the Columbia University archives regarding Sanders when I have time. (I've been in contact with David Alexander about all this.) There were other student publications at the time that might have some references to him.

btw, one other circumstantial link between Sanders and Erdnase that I haven't seen mentioned before is the trick "Divining Rod" in EATCT which has a mining/prospecting theme.

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Bill Mullins » April 2nd, 2010, 1:50 pm

Houdini's copy of the first Drake edition is scanned and online at the Library of Congress HERE. Beware, though -- the file is huge (89 MB).

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Todd Karr » April 8th, 2010, 1:33 pm

Please check the Buzz section for an announcement of our new e-book version of Erdnase for the iPad!

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Bill Mullins » April 23rd, 2010, 11:09 pm

There is a Drake softbound edition on ebay right now:
HERE

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Jeff Pierce Magic » April 23rd, 2010, 11:35 pm

There's a new hardback Dover edition available on Amazon. 130 pages with forward by MArtin Gardner.

Jeff

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Re: Erdnase

Postby David Alexander » April 23rd, 2010, 11:45 pm

Interesting to note that presumably Drake had the copyright page retypeset. Compare the copy on eBay with the Houdini copy. The one on eBay seems clearer and better typeset. The second one with slightly different verbiage was sloppily typeset with bubbles in the metal that broke cutting out parts of the letters.

One makes sense, "Entered according to the Act of the Parliament of Canada..." as opposed to "Entered according to the Act of the Parliament of Congress,..." even though it was only copyrighted in the US. Probably a less than literate linotype operator. There also seems to be a printers' union indicia on the Houdini copy and not on the original.

Also interesting to note that Drake added what appears to be an entire signature of ads for his other books.

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Sebastien L. » April 28th, 2010, 11:59 am

Bill Mullins wrote:There is a Drake softbound edition on ebay right now:
HERE



However, while the seller is describing this copy as a 1902 first edition, it is not the actual 1902 first edition (which wasn't softbound) nor the 1905 drake softbound first edition (which had a yellow cover).

The seller has been repeatedly informed of this fact by various people and yet refuses to update his ebay listing. eBay has been contacted about it and has done nothing. Now the wait begins for the identification of the ultimate buyer, who will then be greatly saddened to learn that he was unceremoniously and consciously scammed by an unscrupulous seller. But of course, since the seller has a high eBay feedback score, eBay won't care and won't do anything.

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Ian Kendall » April 28th, 2010, 1:03 pm

To be fair, it's getting more apparant that the buyer is a shill (ref his comments to me).

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Re: Erdnase

Postby John Bodine » April 30th, 2010, 5:10 pm

Regarding the listing that sold this week, eBay does not have the resources to police every listing to ensure what is pictured is what is as described, that is the sellers responsibility. 100 million listings makes that a pretty difficult task.

In this case, if the buyer receives the item and realizes this is NOT a first edition (paperback or otherwise) they can file a SNAD (Significantly Not as Described) claim against the seller, return the item, and receive a full refund. This is a relatively painless process and the buyer protection offered by eBay offers very solid protection for buyers.

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Sebastien L. » May 6th, 2010, 12:00 pm

John Bodine wrote:Regarding the listing that sold this week, eBay does not have the resources to police every listing to ensure what is pictured is what is as described, that is the sellers responsibility. 100 million listings makes that a pretty difficult task.


Of course. Unfortunately, they also don't seem to have the resources to actually read reports of infractions sent to them, since we had sent a number of reports about the seller being aware that he was mis-labeling what was being sold.

Until, equally obviously, they had more than enough resources to process the reports of the seller for harassment and auction interference, and to do so within hours of the report.

Funny how power sellers get the red carpet, even when cheating others out of hundreds of dollars and being reported for it.

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Richard Kaufman » May 6th, 2010, 3:45 pm

I can tell everyone that thanks to this thread, the buyer in the auction was aware that the item was not as advertised, and returned it. So, good job all around!
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Re: Erdnase

Postby Ian Kendall » May 6th, 2010, 4:19 pm

Yay. That means the seller still got stung for costs, and is still left with a 30 dollar book he paid 700 dollars for (so he told me...)

Bet he wishes he hadn't been so snarky to Jason now :)

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Jeff Pierce Magic » May 6th, 2010, 4:45 pm

Did anyone notice on the Houdini copy on the title page that next to the authors name is hand written "Samuel Robert" the "S.W." in erdnase are marked out and there is a symbol under the E in erdnase. Just thought this might be interesting if this is in Houdinis handwriting.

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Bill Mullins » May 6th, 2010, 5:04 pm

Jeff Pierce Magic wrote:Did anyone notice on the Houdini copy on the title page that next to the authors name is hand written "Samuel Robert" the "S.W." in erdnase are marked out and there is a symbol under the E in erdnase. Just thought this might be interesting if this is in Houdinis handwriting.

Jeff


An earlier bibliographer/cataloguer misidentified the author as Samuel Robert and the error spread throughout libraries. Search elsewhere in this thread for "Samuel Robert" for details.

The double dot under "Erdnase" is standard library notation meaning that for cataloging purposes, this is the correct place to start the author's name. In some Asian langagues, for example, it may be ambiguous which part of the author's name is the "last" name, and so librarian, upon acceptance of a new book, will make such a note on the title page to remvoe the ambiguity.

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Re: Erdnase

Postby Jeff Pierce Magic » May 6th, 2010, 8:09 pm

Thanks Bill.

Jeff

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Re: Erdnase

Postby John Bodine » May 12th, 2010, 7:45 pm

Sebastien, it's a very complicated ecosystem and with 100 million active users and an equal number of items on the site policing is complicated. That being said, people are working on these problems every day. PM me if you have any questions or suggestions, i am always looking for ideas and now hold an interesting position at the company.

Now to keep this on topic, how would people feel about an Erdnase price guide and comprehensive list of editions and variations? What if that information was crowdsourced, following the Wiki model? i would certainly be happy to contribute and enter the prices i have paid for various editions. This would then serve as a resource for collectors and a reference for potential sellers.

This too has the problem of possibly increasing prices, transparency can do that, but could also help reduce prices by more appropriately setting expectations.

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Re: Erdnase

Postby JeffS » July 2nd, 2010, 12:49 am

John,

I would be interested in this, mainly for information on the various editions, but the value information would be very useful to those currently collecting. I have seen many different editions offered at many different prices.

Also, currently posted on youtube is part of an interview with Martin Gardner that appears to come from the Ackerman set, which I don't own so I cannot verify that. The part I watched was interesting , not as much for the information it contained but just to hear the story from Gardner's mouth. I don't know if it was posted with permission or not but it was a very interesting thing to listen to. What this reinforces is that I really need to scrape together the hundred bucks to buy that set or find someone willing to sell me their copy of the disk with the Erdnase info on it.
So I read the riddle.

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Joe Pecore
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Re: Erdnase

Postby Joe Pecore » July 2nd, 2010, 7:53 am

John Bodine wrote:Now to keep this on topic, how would people feel about an Erdnase price guide and comprehensive list of editions and variations? What if that information was crowdsourced, following the Wiki model?


Feel free to use MagicPedia. Many editions are already listed there: http://geniimagazine.com/wiki/index.php ... Card_Table.

I can help break out the editions into it's own wiki page for this purpose.
Share your knowledge on the MagicPedia wiki.

Jonathan Townsend
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Re: Erdnase

Postby Jonathan Townsend » July 2nd, 2010, 9:21 am

Has anyone had the text tattooed on yet - or how about engraved on the head of a pin? Have the illustrations been used in teaching art or (or as clip-art) by art students for hand models? Is there a companion volume on the specifics of applying the techniques described and/or helpful meditations one might use when learning the works? One might consider that half the point of a tombstone is what one can learn or do with the rubbings.

I propose we call such derivative works "Urdnase" and encourage such things.

That passage in the Kalush book about questions unasked about Houdini which became unanswerable in 1962 struck home here - and I'd like to see us make better use of the past before it becomes archeology.

John Bodine
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Re: Erdnase

Postby John Bodine » September 28th, 2010, 5:24 pm

Anyone seen this work by Richard Wiseman? Thoughts?

http://www.richardwiseman.com/erdnase.html

Leonard Hevia
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Re: Erdnase

Postby Leonard Hevia » September 28th, 2010, 5:35 pm

Mr. Wiseman posted it on this thread about several years ago. It's probably about ten pages back on this thread.


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