A good many years ago, we witnessed a fine vaudeville act by Herbert Brooks, in which he presented, among other effects, his celebrated feat of producing from his pocket any card called for by the audience, after the pack had been shuffled, divided into two approximately equal parts, and the halves deposited in his side trousers-pockets. This exceptionally brilliant trick was promptly taken over by other magicians, some of whom "improved" upon the Brooks procedure by undertaking to produce not only chosen playing cards but also postcards, automobile licenses, menus, and various kinds of placards - and thus destroyed the charming simplicity of the effect and robbed it of practically all of its mystery. In at least one instance, the performer carried on his person so huge a load of cards that his attire literally abounded in suspicious bulges, and what should have been a baffling piece of deception was reduced to an absurdity.

We assume that Mr. Brooks made use of a "card index," in which a duplicate pack of cards was "filed" in such a way as to enable him to seize a named card merely by placing his hand in his pocket for an instant. That, at any rate, is the device employed by most performers of the feat, and the one which forms the basis of Sixteen Card Index Gems. An examination of this booklet will convince the reader that the card index has many legitimate and effective uses, in addition to the one for which it was originated. Mr. Andrews explains here sixteen tricks, nearly all good and some amazingly effective, which may be performed with the help of this ingenious piece of equipment.

In addition to the effect produced by Mr. Brooks, the author gives instructions for performing several feats of prediction, a reversal in the deck of a named card, an amusing trick with an "invisible pack," the catching of a named card from a deck tossed in the air by a spectator, The Rising Cards, a book test, a coin-date prediction, and a half-dozen other "gems." In a number of instances, the feats are quite similar to tricks that are usually performed by other means, but the effect is greatly enhanced by the use of the card index - largely for the reason that the selected cards are merely named and not actually drawn from the pack.

Sixteen Card Index Gems is a pamphlet containing thirty pages of explanatory material, well printed on good paper from clear type, and stapled in a soft board cover. If the student will study carefully the construction of Annemann's Billet Index, described in Chapter V of that author's Practical Mental Effects, he should be able, at very small cost, to work out for himself a pair of wholly satisfactory card indexes. Armed with this apparatus, two packs of cards, and the information supplied by Mr. Andrews, he will be prepared to do far better card tricks than most audiences are privileged to witness.