Across the Table

What happens on the other side of the table?

She never saw a single card she turned. In the story that opens this book, Madame Odile has read cards above a pharmacy in Lyon for thirty years, and for twenty of them she has been blind. What she reads is the person in the other chair. Across the Table is about how that is done, and about everyone who has ever sat at a table like hers.

The whole story of card reading

For three hundred years tarot was a card game played for money at the courts of Renaissance Italy. Then, in 1781, a Paris scholar looked at it for a quarter of an hour and declared it the lost book of the Egyptian priests.

Across the Table follows the cards from there: Etteilla, the first professional card reader; Mademoiselle Lenormand and the Nuremberg dice game that carries her name; the magicians and lodges of Paris and London; Pamela Colman Smith, who drew the world’s most famous deck for "very little cash"; Kipper cards and kitchen tables; psychic hotlines, tarot apps, and the algorithms that now read for anyone who asks.

The counterfeiters

From 18th-century fortune-telling bans to modern wire-fraud cases: explore how curse-removal swindles work step by step, and examine cold reading deconstructed technique by technique so that you can recognize manipulative patterns anywhere—including in your own readings.