ARTIFICE, RUSE & ERDNASE

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I'm late posting the news. Lybrary.Com has released
my book, Artifice, Ruse & Erdnase:  The Search for
One Who May Not Want to Be Found.  The title
comes from the secret title of Erdnase's own master-
piece, The Expert At The Card Table.

He put the better known title on the cover but
used his secret title Artifice, Ruse and Subterfuge
at the Card Table on the title page.  S. W. Erdnase
was a pseudonym, and unlike most pseudonym's
it protected an anonymous author.  (His reasons for
remaining anonymous are explored in my book.)

Starting after the Second World War - the book
was published more than forty years earlier in
1902 - various Erdnase Hunters, mainly magicians
have tried to break the pseudonym and reveal the
day to day identity of the author.

My Artifice is the story of these Erdnase Hunters
and the fight against the death of eyewitnesses,
the decay of memory and a dearth of leads to follow.

Order Here
          
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Where've You Been?

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For those of you wondering at my long lay off
from this blog, I've been correcting proofs and
wondering, Is there no end to error?

But now ARTIFICE, RUSE & ERDNASE:
The Search For One Who May Not Want To Be 
Found is in the hands of the printer, and I'm
starting a series of blogs to answer the question,
Who Was Erdnase?

The answer is we don't know.  He wrote under
a pseudonym and his full identity remains a mystery.
ARTIFICE,  RUSE  & ERDNASE* is about the
attempts to solve the mystery, my own efforts included.

He is an enigmatic figure, a lively writer notable for
a bracing honesty and an unfairly forgotten part
of Chicago history.  In the postings to come, I'll go
into all that about S. W. Erdnase which fascinates us.

*S. W. Erdnase was the author of The Expert at the Card Table,
also known as Artifice, Ruse & Subterfuge at the Card Table. 

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