For Your Interest: Inversion
Ooootay, it is amazing to me to see so many guys here that are blown away by the inversion plot. This is a classic routine of card magic. The fact that several people here had never seen it (or quoted a Dan and Dave product for it) is disheartening for me.
The effect of a card reversing in the pack is old as dirt. I don't know if anyone really knows who first published this effect. Methods track all the way back to Expert Card Technique, and surely long before that. James Lewis later came up with the effect of the entire deck reversing around a face down card and published it as "Inversion", in "Encore 3". However, Richard Kaufman published the same idea earlier than Lewis, but "Inversion" has a little more finesse than Richard's routine. Several great handlings of this plot can be found in "The Magic Of Michael Ammar" which includes a handling by Piet Forton and two routines by Ammar, himself.
Now, the Inversion plot as we know it today was made popular by Chris Kenner's "Perversion" in "Totally Out Of Control". To my knowledge this was the first routine that was published which included several reverses of a selected card before the effect of the entire deck flipping over. It is fairly safe to say that most magicians who perform this plot today do it because of Kenner's routine, either in a direct or indirect fashion.
Let me be clear, I do not pretend that I knew all of this off the top of my head. I knew some of this information, but names and exact references get cloudy with time. If you were to look on my bed right now you'd see several books scattered about from my researching of this effect.
Hope that helps,
-C
