In his landmark book on the magic of Johann Nepomuk Hofzinser (J.N. Hofzinser Kartenkünste, 1910), Ottokar Fischer wrote about The Card Automaton, a prop for making any card called for rise from inside an ornate box.
The deck was shuffled—and an audience member could mix the pack—and placed into the box. Any card was named, and it rose through a slot on the top of the container. This could be repeated 32 times—an entire deck of skat or piquet cards; the sevens through aces of the four suits.
Photos of Fischer with the apparatus in Kartenkünste, and Fischer’s recollections, are the only definitive links to Hofzinser. In Volumes I and II of his Non Plus Ultra (2013, English edition), Magic Christian offered references to something that might have been the piece, but the record isn’t clear. The maker is unknown, though a mechanic named Kunz made other mechanical props, as well as at least two automata, for Hofzinser. Fortunately for the community of magic collectors and historians, Magic Christian remains on the hunt for all things Hofzinser, and perhaps one day we will know what the great magician called it (it is Fischer who labeled it an automaton), and what the master’s presentation was.
