Excerpt from a scholarly history of African American spiritual-supply publishing: Black Herman's Secrets of Magic, Mystery, and Legerdemain, written by 'the African American stage magician Herman Rucker' (so named in this source), contains a preface, dated New York 1925, in which Black Herman claims to have been born in Africa and to have travelled in Egypt, India, China, France and England learning 'the mystical secrets... of the magicians and philosophers.' Ed Kay of Dorene Publishing doubted the claim, recalling Rucker spoke with no foreign accent. The preface may originally have been a pamphlet distributed at performances. The book (parlor tricks, horoscopes, dream interpretation, lucky numbers, charm formulae) was copyrighted by Dorene Publishing in 1938. CWB collected this as a parallel case to the Abdullah/Guillaume research into Black performers and teachers who claimed exotic African origins.