In this episode of The Magic Book Podcast, Adrian Tennant interviews Chris Wasshuber, founder of Lybrary.com. Chris shares his journey into magic, the creation of Lybrary.com, and his groundbreaking research on S.W. Erdnase, author of The Expert at the Card Table. He also discusses his upcoming book on prolific magic inventor Lubor Fiedler. Chris offers unique insights into digital publishing, historical research challenges, and his passion for preserving and advancing magical knowledge.

Coming up in this episode of The Magic Book Podcast.

I got into magic in my early twenties when I was a scientist in training, if you will. The way a scientist approaches a new field is first to do a literature search, and then you read that literature. Right? So it it's very book and reading based, and that's exactly the approach I took with magic. I didn't buy any tricks. I only bought books.

You're listening to The Magic Book Podcast. Conversations about classic and contemporary books that teach, illuminate, and celebrate the art of magic. I'm your host, Adrian Tennant, a life time student of magic and mentalism, occasional performer, and long time book collector. Thanks for joining me. This is the 2nd episode of The Magic Book Podcast. Before we dive in, I just want to say some thank yous to Ian, Lance, Craig, Charles, Douglas, John, Billy, Brett, and Julie for your kind words of encouragement and for helping to spread the word about this podcast. Today, my guest is Chris Wasshuber, a pioneer in digital book publishing and a dedicated researcher and publisher of magic history. Chris is the founder of Lybrary.com which is celebrating its silver anniversary.

With a background in engineering, a PhD, and 9 patents to his name, Chris has applied his analytical skills to various aspects of magic. He's perhaps best known for his groundbreaking research on the author of The Expert at the Card Table, S.W. Erdnase, which Chris details in the card sharp and his book. Chris's expertise extends beyond publishing and research. He's also an inventor and has collaborated with renowned magicians including Tommy Wonder and Gaetan Bloom. Today we're going to hear how Lybrary.com became the largest digital media retailer in magic, dive deep into Chris's research into Erdnase, and preview his new book project focusing on the amazingly prolific magical inventor Lubor Fiedler. Chris, welcome to The Magic Book Podcast.

Thank you, Adrian. Happy to be here and talk about various things that I'm passionate about.

Well, let's start at the beginning. Chris, what was your first experience with magic?

The first experience I can remember was at a birthday party. I was invited to seeing a magician. So if I was probably 8 or 9 years old, maybe. And that triggered sort of my first short magic phase. And this phase was basically about 2 years maybe, and it was mainly building stuff because I was from very early on a builder. Right? I was actually not reading a whole lot. I was making stuff. I was an arts and crafts guy and woodworking and that kind of thing was very interesting to me.

And the book that my father gave me basically had various apparatus in there, and I was building stuff. And I remember I gave one performance to my parents and my brother, but I was not really doing magic in that sense. And it didn't last. It was sort of a childhood, you know, episode that many have with other things too. Right? It was interesting for a while, and then I lost interest. And then it took more than a decade in my early twenties when I found back to magic, and then the bug really bit hard, and so I stayed with magic ever since.

You grew up in Austria. Was that a good environment for magic?

Well, I mean, when I was 8, I can't really say that much because I had no contact with any other magician, really. And I was really into magic at that point. It was, as I said, a very short period. But during my early twenties, it was a fairly good environment in the sense there were several shops. We even had the largest magic shop in Europe, Vienna Magic. In Vienna, there were several clubs. So it was a reasonable good environment to get into magic. The hardest part was getting literature, particularly literature in English from the UK or from America.

That was very difficult, and most retailers didn't stock any English titles. And getting those was quite a challenge. But just getting into the hobby and doing it and finding like minded people was not really difficult. And I could fairly easily, once I sort of found my path to magic, was fairly easy to become a member in a club and figure out where I can purchase magic.

Now in that period when the bug bit really hard, what was the first magic book you remember reading then?

Well, actually, it's interesting. The way I got into magic was through math because I passed a very hard math exam at the university I was studying at that time. And I rewarded myself with going to the bookshop. We had across the university a bookshop. And I rewarded myself for saying, okay. I can buy myself a book, just a book that I want to read. It was a technical bookshop. So I was browsing through the bookshop and I found a book of math magic by Martin Gardner.

And that triggered really my interest into magic again and particularly the magic squares and the magic matrix that was a trick in that book that I started to show people as a dinner stand before or after dinner and things like that. And that brought a lot of positive reactions and that really drew me into magic. And then the first sort of real magic book I read was this Handbuch der Magie from Jochen Zmeck. It's a German book. It's still today, I think, the best general introduction to magic. It's sort of the Amateur's Magician's Handbook in German. And it was a very, very good book, very strong emphasis on sleight of hand, and all kinds of errors were covered. It was sort of everything from manipulation to card magic, mentalism, and even some illusions were in there.

But that was the first, if you will, real magic book I read.

Your career brought you to America, and I'm assuming you were also acquiring magic books throughout this period.

Yeah. Yes. So actually since, you know, I got into magic in my earliest twenties when I was a a student and actually a scientist in training, if you will, the way a scientist approaches a new field is first to do a literature search and then you read that literature. Right? So it's very book and reading based and that's exactly the approach I took with magic. I didn't buy any tricks. I only bought books, periodicals, and this kind of the 1st years only sort of literature and reading that and learning from that. And so I had fairly early on, even though I was a poor student and I was not that long into magic, I had already after the first couple of years a sizable library that I accumulated because that's the same thing I did with my other subject, electronics and computers. I bought books, I read, bought journals and periodicals, so it was purely literature driven, my entry.

And it took I think it took almost 4 years or so until I bought the first trick. Right? The real is sort of a trick in a store in terms of a gimmick and and some components to do, a magic trick.

Well, in 1999, you started a project we now know as Lybrary.com, which has become the largest digital retailer specializing in magic in the world. Chris, what originally inspired you to create Lybrary.com?

Well, it came out of the same sort of literature and library I built because after about 40, 50 books, you know, you start to forget what you've read. So I and particularly, I was annoyed by I remembered that I read something, but I couldn't quickly locate it anymore in a book or even sometimes which book. Right? So if you forget part of what you've read. And so I realized that in order to make better use of the investment I made in assembling this library, I needed to digitize it because then you can search and then it's much easier to find things and research things. That initial idea I had around 1996, I think, 1995, 1996. I wanted to digitize and the only way back then that was possible was to type in a book, right, your key in. And I actually tried it, but I quickly realized that's not a practical way. It takes you weeks to just type in one book and, you know, and I wanted to type in at least at that time a few 100 books.

So I realized that was not feasible and I benched that idea. And then in 1999, when I was in the US, I found out that flatbed scanners are actually not any more expensive. You could buy one for about a $100. And I was familiar with OCR technology, optical character recognition, because I read an article a couple of months or a year before that in a computer magazine. And so I immediately put these things together. At the moment, I realized that I can buy a flatbed scanner for a $100. I realized that's the solution for what I want, a digital magic library. And I bought a scanner, I bought software, and I doubt if that system works and it worked.

And then actually, the idea to make a business out of that came a little bit later because I started to digitize that way a couple of books and then I showed it to a couple of friends and colleagues and they all said oh, we want it too. And so I said, hey, you know, I spent now weeks weeks scanning and OCR ing books, and you want them? Well, I thought maybe I ask a few dollars per book or something like that. And that's how the idea of Lybrary.com really came about that I then said, okay. The best way forward is I just set up a little website and I offer this and, you know, as I said, I didn't primarily do this for others. I really did it for myself. So I wasn't that concerned initially will this be successful or I just didn't wanna be the sucker and do all the work and everybody else gets it for free. I decided, okay. Ask for $3 or $4 for, you know, a 500 page book that I digitized.

And that's how it started.

How did the magic community initially react to the concept of ebooks and digital downloads?

Well, the majority either ignored it, thought it was a fad, or even a bad idea. Right? Because back then in 1999, ebooks were essentially unknown. The concept most people can understand but almost nobody had any sort of firsthand experience. Right? There weren't literally no ebooks around. Right? I mean, there were a few it started I think 1998, 1999. The first sort of dedicated ebook reader came out. Before that, you had, I think, the Apple Newton, sort of a personal, assistance or small tablet. So that sort of world technologically was only starting.

Right? This was very early on, highly speculative startups and so it was in magic. Most people didn't really believe this is a lasting trend, it's a fad, But there was a small core of people that were very enthusiastic about it and that was the reason why I kept going because initially, right, it was a business, but it was, you know, you could almost call it a hobby. Right? It was a small side business, something I did, you know, in the evening, on the weekend for my own enjoyment almost. Right? But there was a core group of people that said, hey, this is a great idea. And they understood that the searching is the real cool application coming along with ebooks because now you can actually search in your whole library, not anymore in an individual book, but you could say with an index for example. You can a good book that has a good index, you can search in that book as well. Right? Look up an index and then find stuff. But you could never do this over a whole library.

Right? You would have to have index cards and combine all the indices, but with an ebook, this is automatic. Right? If you have it in a digital format, searching was there. And there was luckily as a group of enthusiasts that understood the value of it and that supported me, that bought my books, and gave me suggestions of what to do and what to digitize. And from there, it grew.

And we should remember that this was long before the Kindle, which is probably what most people think of today for reading ebooks.

Yeah. I mean, Amazon was nowhere near ebooks. It didn't offer any ebooks and nobody was. Right? The only company I remember in the larger book market was a company called FictionWise and they sold fiction ebooks. They were around the same time I think when I started they also started. I I found out about them only later. Right? But it was just as other startups today. Right? I mean, it's it was something very new, very speculative, and many people didn't believe that this will have any future.

Well, 25 years on, Lybrary.com is well established as the biggest digital media retailer in magic. What have been some of the most significant milestones in its development?

Well, I mean, so there I would say there's sort of 2 groups. 1 is landmarks in terms of products. Certain products that I remembered it was a real cornerstones and then technical. So the product landmarks were for the the first big project was digitizing the sphinx with 17,000 pages. That was at a time when scanners were still slow. But today, you can scan a page essentially in a second or or if you do it with a camera. But back then my first scanner that I bought took 2 minutes of scanning 1 page. It then became faster and faster but doing a project like 17,000 pages with the sphinx was a major challenge and particularly The Sphinx, I couldn't get the complete file.

So I first bought an almost complete file from Richard Hatch. At that time, I lived in Texas. Richard Hatch was also in Texas and he was actually very helpful early on giving me suggestions and he was one of those that understood that ebooks has a future. And so he sold me his incomplete file, but then it took me 2 other collectors to complete it that I could even digitize it. But just as the volume, 17,000 pages, well, it was staggering particularly at that time. And then I tripled that with the project several years later with digitizing Genii for Richard Kaufman. Right? So 75 volumes, 55,000 pages of Genii had to be digitized and, you know, Richard seems to be very happy with what I did. Another project that I would say was a real milestone was doing card cordage 1 with Roberto Giobbi.

That was in 2002. So we started I think it was 2,001. So very early in my process, and the new thing there was this was the first ebook that had videos embedded in the ebook itself. So it combines the format of text and illustrations with the format of a video. And so the first Vodum had, I think, more than a 100 video clips in Card College 1 that where Giobbi would demonstrate every move, right, every little thing he teaches. We demonstrated with the videos to show the reader that, look, this is how it should look. Here is a proof that this move is possible. Right? Because as a beginner, sometimes when you read the sleight of hand book, you say this is not possible.

How do you do that? Right? And so this was the first magic ebook that intelligently combined these medias. Right? Combined the printed book, if you will, with a video. And that's, in my opinion, was groundbreaking because Roberto Giobbi really understood how to use that format and sort of the potential of how to make an ebook better than a printed book. Not just cheaper and not just searchable and not just more convenient, but how to make the teaching medium better. Right? And I think that was a real sort of cornerstone and an important project for Lybrary.com. On the technical side, I mean, there were many sort of on business side, there were many sort of not many, but some, you know, important steps. For example, early on, I only did royalty deals. Right? I didn't wanna buy any copyrights.

Right? I I thought the royalty deal is the fairest deal because the product is successful, both the author and I, as the retailer, will publish share, you know, profit from it. But if it doesn't sell, then we share also the risk. Right? That if I buy a copyright, then I either win or lose in a way. Right? If I'm I might win if I get the copyright for cheap and then make a lot more of it or I lose and overpay and never make the money back. Right? And so I only did royalty deals but I then eventually figured out that I have to do copyright deals and purchase copyrights and these kind of things. And that became an important part of my business strategy to grow Lybrary.com and then to actually buy entire publishers. I bought Martin Breese, for example, his entire magic publishing business. And then perhaps the biggest step was in 2009, I made Lybrary.com my full time pursuit.

That it became my career. You know, in beginning of 2009, I quit my job at that time at Elsevier and sort of operated Lybrary.com and ran Lybrary.com full time.

If you're enjoying this episode of The Magic Book Podcast, please consider leaving a rating on Spotify, a review on Apple Podcasts, or just tell a friend. Thank you. Artifice, Ruse and Subterfuge at the Card Table, more commonly known by the title stamped on its cover, The Expert at the Card Table, was self-published in 1902. It's widely regarded as one of the most influential books on card manipulation of the 20th century. Its author was S.W. Erdnase, a pseudonym. But the true identity of Erdnase has been a subject of intense debate and research for over a 100 years. Those who've attempted to solve the mystery have included Dai Vernon, Martin Gardner, David Alexander, Jeff Busby, Richard Hatch and many others, each proposing different theories and candidates. So, Chris, what initially sparked your interest in the Erdnase mystery?

Well, so Erdnase, of course, is one of my favorite subjects. We could talk for many hours here, but I got interested in an unusual way, if you will. So in 2010, remember that at that time, I did Lybrary.com already full time. Right? So I started to do it full time beginning of 2009 and sort of a year or 2 years into that venture I stumble on that earnest threat on the Genii Forum, and I was flabbergasted how large and long it is. But I also realized that this was a bad way to get into the mystery. And, it was essentially an entrepreneurial idea. So I thought like, you know, it might be good to publish a book that sort of reviews the subject or gives an overview so that somebody who is new to that mystery and wants to learn about it has a better entry point.

Right? Rather than trying to read through a messy forum thread where things are out of order, repeated flame wars and whatnot, I wanted to publish a sort of introduction, if you will, or an overview. But I didn't have the time to do it myself. So I was looking for an author. Right? And I also didn't wanna hire anybody who was already in that field because I didn't want that person would have been biased their candidate, to their candidate, to to certain thinkings. And so I made a call in my newsletter to look for an author. I didn't identify that it's a project on earth. As simple as it's an interesting project I have and I'm looking for an author. And anybody who has time, who wants to write and work on that project, email me.

And several people emailed me on that, even known authors that if I would mention the name, people would recognize it. But, again, I didn't wanna have anybody that was really already known or had in any way already heard about Erdnase. And I found Hurt McDermott, who was a screenwriter and who was very enthusiastic about it, who was new to that mystery. Right? He said he has never heard about before, has never looked into that. And he lived in Chicago, so I guess that was for him one reason why he was so interested. And I decided to give him the project. And I told him, look, you have to do the work. You have to write it, but I'm in the background.

If you need a particular book or a particular set of materials, I will help you. Right? I will help you find it and I will be essentially sort of the publisher in the background. I will proofread it and these kind of things, but you have to do the work. And he did a marvelous job with his book, Artifice, Ruse & Erdnase. It is prior to my research, it is, I would say, the best work on Erdnase. So anybody who wants to get an introduction into the field should read it. And that book, then when I read it, started my journey into thinking about Erdnase. And that sort of triggered my thoughts that the research existing research on that subject is very biased and very lopsided.

And so I started to do my own research. And the first blip of that was my nickname hypothesis where I said, okay, Erdnase could be a nickname of a German immigrant because and that was my first research breakthrough, is that the word, Erdnase, plural of Erdnase, was an established word in the 19th century. You can find this in several books. I even found it in documents of the Austrian legislator. It wasn't the common word that you would find on every second page, but it was an established word. It was a completely normal word that people used. And the second point that I found is that it was also a word that people used as a nickname. For example, there was a a a children group in Switzerland and they call themselves Erdnase und And and there were people I found online that gave the nickname Erdnase to the children or to their pets because they played, like, the play in the dirt and these kind of things.

So putting these together, I said, look, it could be an immigrant similar to, let's say, Rotterberg, who came from Germany when he was 16 to the US. Maybe that person had a nickname, Erdnase, and that's why he used it, you know, as a pseudonym. It was a hypothesis. Right? But that sort of started me into it. And the way I wanted to test this hypothesis was to say, okay, there is I was familiar with the fact that there was a linguistic method called foreign language detection. Right? Somebody who grows up not speaking English and then, let's say, most of the US and speaks English similar to my background, you can detect in the way they write if they were speaking a different language before because we make certain grammatical errors or use certain constructs that are not common or not usual not usually used in in in English but used maybe in Spanish or in French or in German. And I found a renowned forensic linguist, one of the pioneers of that field, John Olsson from the UK. I heard him and I said, look, here's the book.

Can you tell me if you can detect any hint of sort of a foreignness in there? Did that author maybe grow up speaking another language in English before or maybe Spanish or French or German? But he came back and said, nope. This guy is American. And he actually said he's as American as they come. There's no foreigners in it. And that was the end for me for my nickname hypothesis. But it brought me into the field, and I continued to think about it and then progressed in my research. And then eventually made the breakthrough fines with the bankruptcy records of McKinney.

And this is as good a time as any to introduce some of the other characters who are part of this mystery. Now you just mentioned McKinney and Company of Chicago which printed the first edition of The Expert at the Card Table. M.D. Smith illustrated the book and his recollections of the author were shared with Martin Gardner. And there's also Frederick J. Drake who was the 2nd publisher. Again according to Martin Gardner after the first printer, McKinney, declared bankruptcy, Drake acquired the printing plates, unsold stock of the first edition, and the rights to reprint the book which he did from 1905 until the late 19 thirties. The author of The Expert at the Card Table's true identity has been something many magic historians have aimed to uncover. Martin Gardner proposed Milton Franklin Andrews as a candidate. Andrews was a car shop and murderer who committed suicide in 1905.

His last name Andrews when spelled backwards becomes S.W. Erdnase. A candidate proposed by David Alexander is Wilbur Edgerton Sanders who was a mining engineer and the son of Wilbur Fisk Sanders, a United States Senator from Montana. S. W. Erdnase is an anagram of WE Sanders albeit with some letters removed. Sanders died in 1935. But Chris, you reject both of these candidates. Why?

So my main critique with all of these researchers is that they made a huge assumption. Right? At the beginning of the research, they made an assumption about the real name of the author. Right? Be it, you know, Andrews, E.S. Andrews, or different Andrews, or be it Sanders, an anagram. But it's a huge assumption because there's zero evidence that's the author's real name. There are only 2 very small or weak pieces of evidence that suggest that he may have introduced himself to the illustrator and to Drake as Andrews. But that evidence is extremely weak. For example, the recollections of the illustrator, M. D.

Smith, is that when Gardner found the illustrator and asked him, do you remember his name? He couldn't remember it. And the only thing he volunteered was that the name had a W in it. And then Gardner made a huge error because he then used, you know, a leading question. And he asked him, so was his name perhaps Andrews? And any investigator, any police detective knows, you cannot use leading questions, particularly with a fragile memory like a memory that is 45 years old. Right? Because Gardner found Smith 45 years after 1902, 1947. So that can very easily produce a false memory. It's well established that using a leading question, introducing a new piece of information can, in such a situation, very easily produce a false memory because Smith might have been familiar with the name Andrews because of some other reasons and then felt, oh, yeah. I I had some familiarity and then thought that was his name.

Right? So basically, you have to throw that evidence out. And, another piece of evidence about Andrews is that Drake, you know, when Vernon became interested into finding out who Erdnase was, he had a friend called Sprong in Chicago and Sprong went to Drake who was then the second publisher, if you will, after Erdnase, who reprinted the book in 1905. And he asked him, and he also first wasn't telling him, and he didn't wanna betray any confidence and then said, you know, reverse the name. And that's how it came to Andrews. But again, there, we don't even know if the author had direct contact with Drake because Drake had already a business relationship with McKinney, with the printer. Right? There wasn't established business relationship. So the author who was self published could have, at some point, asked his printer, McKinney, I want to sell my book, you know, I want to sell the copyrights. Do Do you have a publisher? Do you know a publisher might be interested? And then McKinney could have said, yeah, I I know this publisher that fit into their program.

Let me talk to them. And so McKinney could have been the intermediary brokering that deal. So Drake's information might in no way have to be firsthand. Right? So my main point is that evidence that his name was Andrews is very weak. And even if we make the assumption that he did introduce himself as Andrews to Smith and to Drake, let's make that assumption. Let's say that happened. Who says he introduced himself with his real name? But car shops, at that time, used fake identities all the time because it was a great shield to protect themselves against the authorities. Because we have to remember, back then, there were no IDs.

Nobody had an ID. You said who you were and that was your ID. Right? When you came to a hotel, you didn't show them an ID. You simply said, I'm mister such and such, and that's who you were. Right? Assuming a fake name was a great way to evade authorities if there was a problem. And we have to remember also that a is a cheat, is a criminal. Right? You know, we as magicians idolize these people, right, because they have great skill and we might learn something from them. But in reality, these are criminals.

Right? These are cheats. If the police would find out that somebody's cheating at cut play or at gambling particularly when money is involved, they will get arrested. So it's to me much more likely that the author would not use his real name And there there are several pieces of evidence that point to the fact that Erdnase had some other job besides being a car job. And these pieces of evidence are the following. They are very important because once you understand that he had some other, let's say, job or some other business, it makes absolutely sense that you want strong anonymity because, let's say, you run some other business or you have some other job, you can't be known as cheap. Nobody would hire you. Nobody would do business with you. So there was absolute need for strong anonymity.

And I just wanna mention this piece of evidence because they're really important in my opinion. So we know that even Erdnase says this in his own preface. He says, I'm writing this book because I need the money. So think about this. You have a car shop and he's in need of money. So rather for him to do more car shopping, he decides to write a book. And he writes a great book, this great language, and so on. So that tells us that he thought more highly of his writing skill than his card shopping skill because otherwise you wouldn't do that.

And so it suggests that writing was in some form, maybe part of his other job or part of some other stream of income he did. Another piece of evidence along that line is that he told Smith that he was a car job going straight. Meaning, okay, he was a car chop and now he's giving it up and he's doing something else. If you give up your income of car chopping, you must have some other thing to fall back on. Right? He was he said he was in his mid thirties, not older than 45. So in that period, you're not yet ready to retire. And, clearly, you are you need the money, the author said is in his in his preface himself. So he must have had some other job, skill, business to do.

And so, again, that makes clear that he needed strong anonymity. And there's one other piece of evidence that to me is also very revealing. Smith said that he paid him with a check. It was a low number check. And we have to understand that back then, a checking account was reserved for business owners. Today, when you open your first bank account, it's a checking account because that's the standard account everybody gets. But back then, that was not the case at all. Right? Back then, the normal account was a savings account.

And checking account, the ability to write a check was very special and you needed to have a business or be in some form in trade and so on. So that also proves essentially that Erdnase, the author, had some other kind of business or job or some other sort of income stream where he probably used checking accounts. And that's why, for me, it strongly suggests that he did not introduce himself with his real name to Smith and to Drake, but that he used to shield his identity and to stay anonymous. And, therefore, I think the whole Andrews thing is completely misguided, particularly if you do this at your foundation assumption to then progress in your research. And I think that's the reason why none of the candidates that people found have anything or any real close relationship to earnest. Most had no relationship to writing at all. So how can somebody like that even be earnest? We're looking for a good author. Right? So it's just, in my opinion, a very misguided way to research that.

Now, listener, if you don't want to know who Chris's research has identified as the real author of The Expert at the Card Table, then please fast forward about 13 minutes because we're going to talk about that person next. Okay. So, Chris, what role did Jay Marshall play in uncovering information about an employee of the printing company McKinney called Edward Gallaway and his potential connection to Expert?

Well, so this was actually a surprise to me that the name Edward Gallaway was already known in the 19 fifties. Because the way I stumbled on Edward Gallaway was that when I found the McKinney bankruptcy records, there is a list of employees. Right? Because one of the first things in a bankruptcy process happens is that they pay the outstanding salaries to the employees. Right? That sort of has the highest priority of of payment. And among them was Gallaway and Richard Hatch actually alerted me to him because prior to that, I was not aware of Gallaway even though the name is mentioned in Busby's and Whaley's and Gardner's book, The Man Who Was Erdnase. Because in the 1950s, a certain William C. Griffith found at a Chicago secondhand book dealer a couple of books with an Edward Gallaway bookplate in it, and one of those books was a first edition of Expert, and the other books were a couple of books on gambling. And Griffith gave, as a present, that first edition of The Expert at the Card Table to Jay Marshall. Right? They were friends and Jay Marshall received it as a gift, and Griffith kept the other gambling books with that bookplate.

And from that first edition of Expert at the Card Table bookplate, it also was clear that this person worked at McKinney. Jay Marshall, who was in contact with Martin Gardner, told him about this And so they believed that, okay, Gallaway was maybe a typesetter or worked at McKinney, and this was a small print job, 2 brothers and one typesetter kind of deal, which was not at all the case. Right? McKinney was actually we now know from the bankruptcy records was a fairly large operation. I did 7, 8 printing machines, 2,000 employees, and, well, I would say, a midsized printing shop. But so they found Gallaway. But what was surprising to me is that to the best of my knowledge, I asked around, nobody ever even suspected Gallaway of being Erdnase. So Gallaway was simply, okay, an employee at McKinney and Jay Marshall actually called up the daughter-in-law of Gallaway and discussed a little bit with him and and wrote about this to Martin Gardner. But you can see from the questioning and stuff, they were not considering Gallaway a potential candidate.

And if they would have gone a little bit further, I think they would have realized that's a very likely person to be Erdnase because when I did that, when I heard from Richard Hatch that Gallaway was one of the employees, I checked it in the record, and I realized that, okay, he had a first edition of the expert. He wrote other books. He founded his own school of estimating for printers in Chicago. So here you have a person that, to me, fit the profile. Right? It was an educator, somebody who likes to teach, somebody who likes to write, And then very quickly, I found also out that he self published his books and copyrighted it. So I said, look. This is exactly how Erdnase published his book. I have to look into Gallaway.

And at that point, he immediately became my highest priority or sort of the person I wanted to check out because he looked promising at that point. And then when I actually found the book and I realized, hey, he also writes the price on the title page. Hence, the preface is very similar in terms of the language used. He uses, for example, a very rare expression, imparting knowledge, imparting the knowledge, which is a highly unusual way to use the word knowledge and impart because impart is usually used in a mechanical sense that, for example, you impart motion or you impart movement to a particular object. But imparting knowledge, using it in that sort of unusual way, is highly unusual. It's not unique. It's highly unusual. But you find that used both in expert at the card table's preface as well as in Gallaway's preface to estimating for printing.

And it went on from there. Gallaway used expressions like subterfuge and hard luck and vanished into thin air in a book on print estimating where you would not expect to find these words. Right? You know, you would expect to find these words, magic books, and gambling books, but not in a technical book on print estimating. There's nothing to do with subterfuge, but it still was in there. And so at that point, when I read the preface and I read the book, my belief was okay, disguise darkness. But I deferred judgment. I said, look, I'm not a linguist. You know, I'm interested in that subject, but I'm not an expert.

So I sent this to Olsson. He did an analysis and his conclusion was, yes, this guy has a very high probability of being earnest purely based on the linguistics. And that's how, in a short way, sort of how my research where I focused primarily on the linguistics and it is for me the most important. Because if you think about it, the book we have is the primary evidence we have. Nothing else is as important as the book and all the other evidence, you know, most people, for example, focus on Smith's recollections. Yeah. I mean, they are interesting and they are important, but they're 45 years old. We can't know anymore what he remembered correctly and what he remembered incorrectly.

But the book is the 52,000 words he wrote, right, so it's a much more firm piece of evidence. And so anything we can glean from the book, anything we can extract from it, analyze from it is, in my opinion, the most important piece of evidence and the linguistic fingerprint is such that in my opinion, it is the most promising sort of piece of evidence we have to actually identify Erdnase. And I think that's what I did. Gallaway's fingerprint, linguistic fingerprint is so close to Erdnase's that there's little to me, it leaves little room, plus all the other things around it, right, that he published his books like Erdnase. That he was working at McKinney, so he has the means and the motive almost to publish and print a book cheaply on a budget and things like that. Right? And that he performed magic. He'd had a 3 to 5 year stint at the circus, but he changed his career, became a circus performer, performed magic, punch a jewelry, and these kind of things. So there's a lot of evidence.

He fits the physical description of Smith, but he has the right height, the right age, the right complexion. So every piece that we can identify fits. He has the magic background. He has the literature at home. It's it's sort of to me, it's unmistakable that he must be Erdnase.

In your book, you examine Edward Gallaway's candidacy for Erdnase through the lens of a prosecutor who has to prove a criminal case I'm curious Chris, how has the magic community responded to your findings in The Cardsharp and his Book?

So people that read my book and, you know, don't have already a favorite candidate or had a favorite candidate reacted very positively. I mean, the I have dozens very nice emails and phone calls and things like that where people said, look, I totally agree with you. This is marvelous research. You know, I've used also certain analysis that has never been used before, not just the linguistic, but in other areas too. And many reacted very positively. And some even said, okay, look, I first thought it was, I don't know, Sanders and now I I am absolutely convinced it's yours. But there has also been a lot of sort of criticism by people that have their own candidate who have done some research or some analysis before. And they make all kinds of arguments.

But in my opinion, so far, nobody has really made a sensible argument. Magic and gambling books he had in his libraries were the books of his wife. It belonged to his wife, and not him. These kind of sort of silly arguments or some others say, well, Gallaway was about 33 years old, right, when the book was 33 years in 1901, right, so when the book was finished. And some say, well, that that's too young, or you cannot be an expert like that. And or if you have printer, you don't have the time to develop sleight of hand that way. To those people, in my opinion, I have to say they're ignorant because just look at Marlo. Right? Marlo was a mechanic.

Right? He worked in a metal shop, working on lathes and other machines that did metal stuff. And he already published also in his early thirties groundbreaking material, and he was an expert. So in my opinion, 33 years old is plenty of time for him as a bachelor. Right? He only married very briefly before 1901. So he was most of the time a bachelor. He was at times a circus performer. There is plenty of time for him to develop the sleight of hands that is displayed in The Expert at the Card Table and also had plenty of time to develop his writing and then actually write the book. So what what I'm saying is that I think the primary criticism I've received is in most cases, I have never heard a really good argument where I say, look, and because of that, Gallaway, you know, that's a discrepancy.

You know? Or this is why Gallaway can't be Erdnus, things like that. Which we have with all the other candidates that there are in many cases, many clear indications where it's a real problem. Right? Maybe they're too tall or maybe they have never written anything or there's no connection to magic in any form. These kind of discrepancies do not exist for Gallaway. I've not heard any argument where I say, okay. That's a good argument. We don't have the evidence for that, or there's something missing. There's nothing like that.

Chris, are there any unexplored avenues or gaps in your research that you're hoping to fill?

So the the one thing that I'm still sort of missing after all the things I found about Gallaway and and all the articles and books he wrote, There's one thing I could not find, and that is we know from the 19 fifties, from this William c Griffith that I mentioned that gave the first edition to Jay Marshall. He had a couple of other books, gambling books with the same Gallaway bookplate in it. Those books are lost, have vanished. I've tried to trace William c Griffith's library. I think he died somewhere in the late nineties or something. But nobody, not even his family that I could contact, remembered what happened to his library. I would like to find these books because we don't know the titles of these books. I would like to know what other gambling books with Gallaway's bookplate were there.

And on top of that, I know from Gallaway's biography that he was a book guy. Right? He had a large library on all kinds of subjects from astronomy to math to religious subjects, of course, printing to magic to gambling to Poe to Dickens, and many of them precious books, you know, bound in leather. He had a large library, and he put a bookplate in, but I could not find other books with that bookplate. I mean, they only found 2 other books, but those were all the books from the 18th century about a collection of reviews. The book of the learner is called. It's one sort of a volume that I could a series of volumes, and I could find evidence of 2 volumes with a Gallaway bookplate. But based on what I know, there should be 100 of books with this bookplate. And of course, primarily, I'm interested in magic and gaming books, but any books of any subject with that bookplate I would like to locate.

Maybe we can either link to the bookplate. I also have an article on that on my website and ask people, maybe just take a look in your own library because there could be and there should be somewhere some gambling and magic books with his bookplate. And maybe somebody has them and not even knowing that he has a bookplate with Gallaway in there. Right? So that's really still, I would say, the open place and the open sort of, a a gap where I know there is evidence. Right? Because we all know at least there are a couple of gambling books that in the 19 fifties Griffiths has found. Right? And they where they are, I don't know. If we could locate them, that would be great. But locating other books is should also be in some way possible.

So anybody who has an idea how to go about this or anybody at least look in your library or maybe ask around, Maybe we can locate a few more books with the Gallaway bookplate because that would help us sort of inform us more about Gallaway because once you know which books he had, we can say more about his interest and these kind of things.

So listener, if you have any books in your library with Edward Gallaway's bookplate, Chris would love to know about them if you'd like to check your bookshelves now please pause the podcast it's okay we can wait we'll both still be here when you get back let's switch gears now Lubor Fiedler born in 1933 in Czech Slovakia was a chemical engineer, a magician who was widely respected for his innovative magic inventions. His most famous creation is probably the gazinta boxes also known as the luba die which is now considered a classic. Fiedler's approach combining his scientific background with creative problem solving led him to develop numerous effects Lubor Fiedler's work is now the subject of a book you're in the process of writing. So, Chris, what inspired you to write a book about Lubor Fiedler?

Well, so that was also business driven because when I started Lybrary.com and after a couple of years, I realized that there was very little material in English about Fiedler. Right? I knew from Austria. First, I've met Fiedler there. I've seen the lecture he gave. It was even one of the first lectures I ever saw in in magic. I knew he wrote 2 books in German there that were published, and I read them. But there was nothing, you know, I could find any book in English about Fiedler. So I made early on a decision around 2000 4 or 5 or so in that time frame.

I should write a book on Fiedler. And so I started to collect material on Fiedler. And the the first and most important part was that I was trying to get the the copyrights to these two books that he wrote in in German. And I found out that these books were already translated by Bill Palmer for Howie Schwartzman. Howie Schwartzman was the liaison for Fiedler in the US. But these translations never were published, and so I was able to acquire them and that was the first building block. And then I bought the rights to the old East German magic magazine called Torber Kunst, also a long running magic journal. And I bought this not because of Fiedler.

I simply bought it because I thought it's a good idea that I digitize it. And then in there, I find a special issue on Fiedler and some other contribution to Fiedler because while Fiedler was in Czechoslovakia, his contact with East Germany was the only contact he had with a foreign nation behind the iron curtain in the East block. And so that gave me sort of the second piece of contents on Fiedler and that started to constitute a a core. I translated the contributions of Fiedler. I got a few other bits and pieces from friends, other contributions to magazines, and I started to stitch together a story of life because I was friends with one of Fiedler's early close friends and and associates, Michael Hitzel. And he, you know, told me a lot about Fiedler, gave me information, and so I started to build a book that I wanted to publish as an ebook. But then when I was at the point of publishing, I actually I sent it to Richard Kaufman to have it reviewed in Genii. And then when I did that, there was, I think, 2010 or so in that time frame.

Kaufman said told me, what? You're writing a book on Fiedler? I'm writing a book on Fiedler! And so, he together with Mark Setteducati were sort of working on a book on Fiedler and said, okay. My intention is to honor Fiedler and to celebrate him, so I will give you my book and all the contents, everything I've collected. You write the book and then you publish the printed book and I publish the ebook. And we actually made a contract together with Lubor Fiedler. Right? Fiedler, Kaufman, and myself signed it to that extent that there will be one book, one project, and that should be the book. But then Fiedler died and Kaufman had so many other projects that I eventually bought that project back from Kaufman and then was getting all this information that he had on Fiedler. He had a collection of tricks and prototypes, and Mark said that Ducati helped me a lot with additional information.

And that sort of started then, for me, the project again in a second phase. And I'm still at the process of putting things together because it's incredible how many things Fiedler invented. And in in some cases, he invented a new principle, maybe had an idea how to use it as a trick, maybe even made a few prototypes or sold a couple of copies, and then forgot about it, and then moved to the next one. So there's a huge amount of material that most people will not know, that most people will have never seen, but interesting tricks and ideas and principles that he came up with. And most recently, in my this year's trip to Austria, I was able to acquire Fidlas personal notebooks. Right? He had 4 notebooks written in check. They were thought to be lost. Nobody knew where they were.

The belief was that after Fiedler died in 2014 that those books were somehow thrown away or whatever. But I was able to find them and acquire them. And now we have another set of about a 1,000 pages of additional information that we have to transcribe, translate, study, and these things unfortunately delayed the project beyond where I wanted to be because I was already lined up in the beginning of this year to actually release it this year. But with those notebooks, it's just another huge amount of information that has to be in some form incorporated, and that will unfortunately delay it further.

Well, we've waited this long, so we can probably afford to wait a little longer for the definitive treaties on work. As you've been conducting the research, Chris, are there any lesser known aspects of Fiedler's career that you've uncovered?

Well, I have to be honest that I haven't really uncovered anything new about his life, I would say, because there was a fantastic article by Dustin Stinnett in Genii a couple of years back on Fiedler that really retells his story of life very accurately and in great detail. I found a few bits and pieces here and there, but nothing that I would say is still fundamental. But I think what this book will bring out more than an article in Genii is to simply document the enormity of his creative and inventive mind. That's why I truly, not just believe, but I know that Fiedler is by far the most creative genius we had in magic. There's nobody with that volume of sort of ideas and creation, and he was able to create new things essentially on demand. You could show them something, some piece, or something new, and he had new ideas essentially on the spot. I experienced this myself when I visited him in Bruno for one full day. Didn't matter.

I gave him a present or something, and he immediately riffed, like, 6, 7 ideas how he can use that in magic, new ideas and new ways of incorporating this. It was mind boggling. Right? And he did that essentially for most of his life. The amount is staggering, and we will certainly not get everything, right, but I think now with the notebooks I mean, the manuscript right now is almost 600 pages already without the notebooks and now we have another 1,000 pages of of notebooks. So it will be a massive tome and it I think it will be an inspiration for creators and innovators for the next 200 years. It's really because a lots of ideas and principles haven't been fully developed. Many are just sort of ideas. Until you can do this, or this is strange, and or this might be interesting, and these kind of things.

And just reading through this, it it's hard for me to read through because I'm also a creative and innovative person. I wanna stop at every paragraph and and sort of think about it and have, like, my own ideas on how this could be used or how I so I think it will be a wonderful inspiration for people who want to get some sort of impetus in terms of, you know, here's an interesting idea, here's a principle that could be developed into something new or here's something that could be combined. And just documenting Lugo's sheer creative mind is wonderful. Right? And is is a great experience for me doing this project, but I think it will also be a wonderful experience for anybody who is interested in, not the latest trick, but interested in interesting principles and novel ideas or fascinating scientific Principia that have been used to create a trick and things like that.

How do you think Fiedler's background as a chemical engineer influenced his approach to inventing magic?

No. It was fundamental. But not just chemistry, of course, he invented several fascinating effects based on chemistry. Right? So if you look, for example, at this Combusto or at this finger flash and many other things which are purely chemical based inventions. But one of the keys of his success, in my opinion, is that he was knowledgeable in many fields of engineering, of science. He knew about electronics. He knew about mechanics, material science, optics, geometry, whatever. Right? And in one of the interviews I listened to him on TV, he actually mentions he says, it is important that you know the tips and the peaks of every field so that you have an idea of what you can do with certain technologies or with certain bits and pieces of inventions.

And he was able to sort of bring this into magic and then combine it with his creativity and with his ability to observe. Right? I think one of the key reasons why he had so many ideas, he was extraordinarily observant at observing small things. Let's say he's in the kitchen and he prepares food or something and, you know, a bottle suddenly topples over or maybe just shakes a little bit or something sort of slightly unusual happens. He was able to notice this and then analyze it immediately. Okay. Why did this thing that I didn't expect to happen? And then he was able to very quickly find some use in magic for it. And that allowed him to make so many tricks. Right? And so interesting tricks.

For example, one of the cool examples of that is if you look at his Tenyo trick, The Impossible Pen. I don't wanna describe here on the on the podcast how it works, but anybody who knows how this works or who has the trick, the way this works is so fascinating and marvelous, and he found this by accident, by simply observing how certain things he worked with were behaving and operating and moving, and he turned this into a trick. And that is a gist of Fiedler. He observed the world around him in much more finer and fine grained detail than we usually do. Like, we would ignore such things or you wouldn't give it a second thought just because something slightly moved or, I don't know, looked maybe a little bit different. We don't even recognize these things. He spotted these things, extracted them, and turned them into a magic trick.

Do you have a working title for the book you're writing about Lubor Fiedler?

Yes, I do. It's basically his name. This is Lubor Fiedler and then the subtitle is A Genius Like No Other.

Love it. Finally, in your own library, what's your most cherished book and why?

That's actually a very hard question because I have many books and it would almost be unfair to just pick 1, right? It's just too many. But let me pick one that is a German book that actually I only read recently. It's an old book. It's actually not just one, but I wanna mention one particular author. Because when I read that book, it wasn't necessarily the tricks. The tricks are great. But it was the way it was written. I couldn't stop reading it.

It was fascinating the way this author packaged sort of the tricks into a story and the way he brought it. And this guy's name is Hans Friedrich. His books appeared in the 1940s. These are beginners books. Right? There's one book on card tricks and one book on other close-up magic. But to me, this is a wonderful book just to read. Right? For a magician, if you can read German, I highly recommend to check out Hans Friedrich and just read the books. You might learn a few interesting tricks, but it's really just the way the book is written.

And I think many authors could learn from that. Of course, having a very analytical style and providing the information is great. Right? And that's what we are reading magic books mostly for. Right? We wanna learn a trick. We wanna learn a move. But if you wanna go the next level up and to some degree, Erdnase has done this too. His book part of the reason why Erdnase's book is still the book it is today and revered that much is not only because the content is great and he teaches some marvelous slides and and tricks and so on, but it is because it is really well written. It is readable even when it's highly technical prose.

Right? He always throws in some interesting idiom or makes a funny comment or things like that. And this Hans Friedrich has taken this, I would say, even further because it's a real complete story line, story arc. He puts it in. He writes very well, very engaging, very fun. So I wish more authors would also work on their writing skills. Then many magic books would be even more readable. Right? And we would read them not just because they are pieces of information we want to learn, but because they're just enjoyable to read. And that's, one example at least in German that I can recommend.

Excellent. Great conversation. Chris, if the listener would like to learn more about you, the Cardsharp and his Book or Lybrary.com, what's the best way to do that?

Simply type in Lybrary.com. Go to my website. There you will find more than 10,000 products. You can browse and search, but I also recommend take a look at the articles. Right? There's a article section, and there you find a lot of things that I think are going above and beyond just selling your products. For example, I wanna mention 2 things that I think are really useful for magicians. 1 is I call the magic knowledge base. It's a full text search engine into all the magic books and gambling books that I've digitized.

It's a tool I personally will use almost every day. It's such a powerful research tool. If you wanna find your own gems in magazines or in literature that nobody else could recommend to you. Use the magic knowledge base. You will find lots of great things. And it's freely available. Right? So you only need to register an account and sign up for the newsletter. Those are the 2 things I require.

But then you have full access to the magic knowledge base, an extremely powerful searching tool. And the other tool I provide particularly for authors is I have a tool that I call Card Illustrator. It's freely available online. And check it out. I wrote an article about it which is available on my website, which is a tool that you can use to illustrate magic books. When you have, for example, you wanna show a fan of particular cards or a a ribbon fan of a setup, this tool allows you to make high quality illustrations with essentially a press of a button. So you have to type in a few things and you have to type in some commands of which cards and how they are positioned in your illustration. But other than that, it's a very flexible tool and a very convenient tool if you need illustrations with cards.

And there are many other things you can find there, but those are the two resources I can really recommend because, first, they're free and they're really useful for magicians. And other than that, I suggest just check out my website with more than 10,000 products for the magician. I think you will have at least more than a weekend time to to browse through that and to find something. And if there's something you don't find or you have a question, I have a contact form or if you get my newsletter, you can simply reply to my newsletter and that way very easily reach me. And I'm more than happy to answer questions or discuss art needs with you or whatever. Right? I'm very approachable and very accessible for people who want to talk to me.

Absolutely. And I'll also include links to the resources you mentioned in this episode on the website at The Magic Book Podcast.com. Chris, thank you so much for being my guest on The Magic Book Podcast.

Thank you so much. It was fun, enjoyable, and I I hope you are successful and continue with your podcast. I I think they're fascinating listening to other people in our community.

Thank you so much. We covered a lot of ground today. Chris shared with us how he landed on Edward Gallaway as the person most likely to be S.W. Erdnase. We previewed his upcoming book about Lubor Fiedler, and he pointed us to free resources on Lybrary.com, the magic knowledge base for literature searches, and the card illustrator for creating book illustrations. I hope you enjoyed listening as much as I enjoyed talking with Chris. You've been listening to the second episode of The Magic Book Podcast. You'll find a transcript with time stamps and links to resources mentioned in this episode on the website at The Magic Book Podcast dot com. If you have a question or would like to suggest a topic for a future episode, please contact me, adrian at The Magic Book Podcast dot com.

You can also leave a voicemail on the website's contact page or comment on the Facebook page. Thanks again to Chris for being so generous with his time. And thank you for listening to The Magic Book Podcast. I've been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next time. Goodbye.