A CLASSICS of GAMBLING LITERATURE

Introduction:

In 1894, British gambling researcher and fraud investigator John Nevil Maskelyne published a book entitled Sharps and Flats: A Complete Revelation of the Secrets of Cheating at Games of Chance and Skill. Due to the fact that this was the first detailed study on cheating and crooked gambling, and possibly due to its controversial nature, it became an instant classic.

Sharps and Flats: A Complete Revelation of the Secrets of Cheating at Gambling

Since this book was long obtainable only as an expensive collector's item, the GBC, in Las Vegas, Nevada, published a reprint of the second edition.

With the growing popularity of the internet the entire text is now made available as an online resource, in the HTML format.

Mission Statement:

In the interest of preserving great classics, we have decided to publish the first online edition of this work. The entire text is made available through the content link on this site, in the HTML format.

For most part the text remains unedited, to retain the flavor of the old English language. However, we took the liberty to update some of the spellings of certain words, that may appear as typos, to our readers. There are also quite a few typos in the original text; we saw no benefit in replicating these typos, as they were simply mistakes, so we fixed those, too. We also added annotation where we though was necessary. These annotations appear in blue italics throughout the text. And finally, we also took the liberty to ad some subheadings, as we were dividing the text for individual HTML pages (this was necessary for better navigation).

All the materials (text and images) were taken from a well-worn early first edition of the book, that we own. Apparently, there's "forensic evidence" that our copy of the book had once been used as as glass coaster, amongst other things.