ABSTRACT
In the 1820s Robert Bailey, a Virginian who had given up gambling to write about it, described an elaborate trick he had used to entice a man to bet on the contents of a needle case. Seven decades later, John Philip Quinn, a Chicago gambler and itinerant reformer, wrote of gamblers still profiting by versions of Bailey’s ruse. Such tricks, frequently sketched in books designed to expose gamblers’ wiles, are described as though they exist outside of time, outside of history, in the curious and constant realm of human greed.
