Manuel à l'usage des actionnaires des loteries, royale de France, de Colognè, d'Offenbourg, et des Pays-Bas Autrichiens.

ou, Calculs indubitables et combinaisons savantes trouvées dans les papiers du célèbre Cagliostro, lors de son arrestation à Rome.
Paris: Chez Granion.. 1791.

The Quack of Quacks

First edition. 8vo in 4s. 198x115mm. pp. [10], 1-33 [32], 34-152. Frontispiece. 32 pages of tables, one folding leaf, 15 pages illustrated with 90 vignettes]. At the beginning is a leaf entitled "Combinaisons de Jeux des Loterie Royales" with a newspaper clipping pasted on the verso. Bound in at the end is Histoire de la Loterie depuis la première jusqu'à la dernière Loterie La Loterie des Lingots d'or par Alexandre Dumas fils. Paris: Chez tous les libraires. 1851. Bound in green half cloth (but with corner pieces missing), marbled paper covered boards. Spine lettered in gilt. Corners and edges a little rubbed, slight bumping to head and foot of spine and some scuffing to boards. Some light foxing in places and a damp stain to the edge of the first six leaves. Otherwise an excellent copy of a rare book, Worldcat locating only two copies, at the BNF and the Kress Library at Harvard and with no copies appearing in the auction records.
In 1776, Alessandro Cagliostro (1743-1795) arrived in London after several years dodging creditors and the law on the continent. He was a rich man with no visible means of support. But London, then as now, asked few questions as to the source of his funds which were, for the record, swindling, pimping his underage girlfriend and forging bills of exchange. What Londoners really wanted to know (then as now) was how to get rich quick. So, Cagliostro, with the help of mysterious manuscripts stolen in Rome, started to predict the lottery numbers. He became a sensation: the frontispiece to this extraordinary book shows our man, described as a "cabaliste", being consulted by three English ladies. Cagliostro pulled similar stunts in other major European cities, and encouraged publishers to print his predictions and the extraordinary methods he used to divine them. The main market for them was France but this dried up when, in 1793, the Revolutionary government put an end to the Royal Lottery. When the French lottery was restarted these "lottery prediction" books were published in vast numbers.
But this is an early one. Printed in 1791, this is an early "lottery manual" and the first to include Cagliostro's name and almost certainly the only one carrying his name that was printed during his lifetime. It is, accordingly, the best guide to Cagliostro's methods and provides a fascinating insight into his occult mind. The book contains cabalistic tables, mathematical martingales and other "mystic manipulations of numbers". There is a section on how predict lottery numbers through the interpretation of dreams. 90 images showing dream subjects are shown alongside the number that the dream signifies. There is a table explaining how the timings of sunrise and sunset affect the numbers. In short, the whole book is an entertaining farrago of fakery and magical flummery. Cagliostro was a proper rogue, constantly in and out of prison, an enthusiastic Freemason and with a nice line in alchemy, psychic healing and mesmerism. But he strutted on a big stage: Goethe wrote a play about him and Carlyle called him "the Quack of Quacks".

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