Card Warp

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Created by Roy Walton, and an outgrowth of Jeff Busby's "Into the Fourth Dimension... and Beyond," Card Warp is a unique effect in which one card is folded in half widthwise (i.e., squat and fat), and another lengthwise (i.e., long and thin), then the latter is pushed through the former and emerges inside out (i.e., if it begins folded back-outward it emerges folded face out). Many, many magicians have built on, expanded, or otherwise varied the effect since its publication, including Bob McAllister ("Greenwarp," Richard's Almanac, September, 1983), Darwin Ortiz ("The Card Warp Deck," Darwin Ortiz At The Card Table, 1988), Tyler Wilson ("Scarred Warp," Dominatricks, 2006), Jay Sankey ("Definitely Warped," 100% Sankey, 1990), David Acer ("The Card-Warp Get-Ready," a.k.a. "Prepare for Warp," Natural Selections, Volume II, 1999), Bob Farmer, Howard Schwarzman, Bruce Cervon, and the list goes on. Jeff Pierce is openly and publicly collecting material related to Card Warp in preparation for an encyclopedic book on the subject.

[edit] Soundbites

Excerpted from Abracadabra magazine:

"Card Warp hit the magical market for the first time at the IBM Convention on the 19th September, 1973. We [Davenports] took 220 (yes, two hundred and twenty) with us and sold them all in one day."

Excerpted from Jeff Busby's Epoptica (Number 6, August 1984):

"In 1970, while still in my mid-teens, I purchased a Japanese book issued by the Tenkai Prize Committee called MASAO ATSUKAWA'S CREATIVE WORKS IN MAGIC. The book dealt with original effects by Atsukawa and a great deal of the material utilized the shape of objects to create some unusual magic - topological magic, if you will. I became interested in one of Atsukawa's effects called 'Three Quarter Card'. The gaff is basically a card with one quarter missing, that allows a penetration effect to take place. The problem was that the cards could not be shown cleanly. In playing around with the Atsukawa effect, I hit upon the idea of replacing the missing quarter with just a slit running from one edge of the card to the centerpoint. This allowed me to perform all sorts of unique penetration effects, but in a much cleaner and more open fashion. Still playing with the single slit card, I eventually came up with the E-fold idea which led ultimately to the effect of a single card turning inside out - an effect which was finally written up in November of 1972 and published in January 1973 as INTO THE FOURTH DIMENSION...AND BEYOND. I think it fairly well known that this was the effect that led to Roy Walton's variant handling that was issued (and I might add, initially without permission, but belatedly given after the effect was on the market) as CARD WARP. This took the magic world by storm."