This is how quickly things have grown. I started the year off with my Dover edition and a new pack of red backed Bee playing cards and this is where things stack up now. It includes three more editions of Expert at the Card Table, the indestructible edition (which I have so far resisted dropping in a glass of water in case it isn’t), the ‘Bible’ edition and the Charles T Powner edition. The large stack of papers are a mixture of old newspaper articles, at this point mostly about Milton Franklin Andrews, the first volume of The Sphinx magazine that contains the first mention and first known advertisement for the books, and some print outs of articles I’ve found on line that I was concerned were risking being lost to the dusky corners of the internet. Oh and a print out of a pdf version of the book so that I can lay it flat and not have to break the spine on one of the other copies.
When this idea first popped into my head I mostly wanted to sit down and improve my card skills and maybe poke around a little bit into the history. The problem is the history is so fascinating that it is having the habit of taking over from the card work. I have seen ten different names linked to Erdnase and so far every one that I have read even a couple of lines about has a story worth following even if I don’t believe they wrote a word of EATCT.
The camera’s auto-focus seemed to like the copy of Ghosts of Colorado Springs and Pikes Peak so I will touch on that. It contains a story about the murder of Bessie Bouton and says that she still haunts the spot on Cutler Mountain today. The book was published in 2012 and mentions sightings as recently as 2011. On its own it is an okay ghost story but the ‘fact’ part of the story is an example of very lax research (and poor proof reading). The author refers to Milton Franklin Andrews as Andrew Franklin Milton multiple times, gets the timeline of the murder-suicide wrong and at one point ask the question ‘Could S.W. Erandise (yes she misspells Erdnase’s name wrong)be an anagram for Andrew Franklin Milton?’ No matter who you believe wrote Expert at the Card Table that answer to this question is no because an anagram uses every letter from the word or phrase in a different order at least once. She also refers to EATCT as an ‘infamous book’ instead of famous which is a pet peeve of mine.
Turns out I get angry when talking about this book so I’ll just say while I won’t be on the lookout for anything else by this author it did at least teach me to not trust everything I read with out further investigation. For a fair while most of what I knew about Milton Franklin Andrews (also not an anagram if you spell Erdnase correctly) came from reading an article in the San Francisco Call which seems to have gotten most things right also leaves out a fair bit that is covered in other papers. Though I guess it is not strange when dealing with con-men and murders that the facts are often not what they seem at first. So if you are apt to believe in ghosts and spend some time on Cutler Mountain you may just run in to poor Bessie Bouton.
Still doesn’t excuse poor proof reading. Or not understanding how an anagram works. Especially doesn’t excuse misusing infamous.