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The hunt to find the true identity of S. W. Erdnase, the author of The Expert at the Card Table, published in 1902 in Chicago, has been raging for more than a century. The book is as revered by gamblers and magicians as the Bible is by Christians.
One of the first and most active Erdnase hunters was well-known science writer, puzzle expert, and magician Martin Gardner, who erroneously thought he identified cardsharp and murderer Milton Franklin Andrews as being Erdnase. After Andrews, many other candidates were proposed, but none had a case strong enough to withstand scrutiny. None wrote like Erdnase, nor had sufficient opportunity, nor even a good motive, to write the book. Their cases were largely based on wild theories built on little evidence and held together by flawed assumptions.
DI Dr. Chris Wasshuber, a trained scientist, engineer and hobby magician with an interest in puzzles and hard problems, took on the challenge of trying to find Erdnase. Rather than continue to massage the same old evidence, he decided to look for new documents that would aid in the search. In a breakthrough discovery, he found the James McKinney and Jamieson-Higgins bankruptcy files from 1903. James McKinney & Co. was the printer for the self-published The Expert at the Card Table.
In this ebook Dr. Wasshuber tells the story of how the bankruptcy records were found, and how they allowed him to zero in on Edward Gallaway. Rather than focus on aspects we had no good evidence for he centered his investigation around the book itself and the linguistic 'fingerprint' of the author. Over the course of six years, Dr. Wasshuber inspected and searched in countless newspapers, archives, and genealogical records to piece together the remarkable life story of Edward Gallaway, a learned printer and entrepreneur, who was fluent in German, who had an insatiable appetite for reading and knowledge, and who most surprisingly also had a circus career performing magic and Punch & Judy. Every new piece of evidence found about Gallaway further confirmed that he was S. W. Erdnase.
Dr. Wasshuber hired renowned forensic linguist Dr. John Olsson to conduct a detailed study of the writings of Erdnase, Gallaway, Roterberg, Hilliar, Sanders, and Wilson, which resulted in Gallaway most likely being the elusive Erdnase due to their very similar linguistic profiles. Dr. Olsson's entire report is included in this ebook.
The ebook includes all the primary evidence, and analysis on which Dr. Wasshuber bases his conclusions, except the bankruptcy records, which are available separately. A century-old mystery has been solved. Erdnase has been found. Read the fascinating story and learn everything we know about a man who made quite a name for himself in the print industry, but whose alter ego would become revered by gamblers and magicians the world over.
