AI Linguistic Analysis of Erdnase: Part 2

PROMPT

I have the following texts:

1. "The Expert at the Card Table" by S.W. Erdnase, self-published in 1902. Printed at James McKinney in Chicago. We know that S.W. Erdnase is a pseudonym because, after more than 100 years of searching, nobody with that name was ever found.
2. "Jack Pots" by Eugene Edwards published in 1900. Published by Jamieson-Higgins. Printed by James McKinney in Chicago. Eugene Edwards is believed to be a pseudonym, but it is not possible to conclusively establish this, because there are people with the name Eugene Edwards, and nothing further is known about the author.
3. Articles and books about estimating for printers, written by Edward Gallaway from 1927 to 1930.
4. Articles by Willbur E. Sanders about mining from 1899 to 1906, and an article about Montana.

The file name has the author name and year of publication at the beginning. This allows you to know which file is which text and to which author it belongs.

Here are biographical sketches of Edward Gallaway and Wilbur Sanders:

EDWARD GALLAWAY

The head of our comprehensive course in Printing Estimating was born in Delphos, Ohio, at a time which shall be designated simply as Anno Domini. His early education was had at German schools where he received particularly fine drill in mathematics. When only a boy he worked, during his vacations, in the office of the Delphos Weekly Herald and at the age of fifteen he became a devil on that newspaper, there being no such thing as an apprentice at that time. By the time he had reached seventeen, he was writing editorials for this paper.
When he was eighteen he came to Chicago for a time until homesickness drove him back to Delphos. Then, a bit later, he went to Fort Wayne and set type on a German newspaper for a year. He then returned to Chicago to work for C. N. Trivess, where he stayed several years.
Young Gallaway then became what he terms a “typographical tourist,” a travelling compositor who never walked a foot or paid a cent of railroad fare. In his travels he reached Fort Payne, Alabama, where he established and ran the Weekly People for a year. Those were exciting days in the South when the after-the-war feeling was still strong. Following this editorial adventure, Gallaway embarked upon a circus career. For three summers he travelled as the “Orator” for various small circuses; his field of action was the front of the tent where his oratorical powers reached a high state of perfection.
In 1898, Gallaway came back to Chicago to work for Bentley, Murray and Company, where he remained for the following twenty years, during fifteen of which he was superintendent. In 1918 he came to The Lakeside Press as an estimator. His duties, however, have been many and varied for he has worked in a number of departments in this organization, including intensive experience in the Operating Department. When, in the autumn of 1922, the Estimating Course was projected, Mr. Gallaway compiled the lessons and instructed the classes and is now engaged in completing his series of pamphlets on the vital subject of Printing Estimating.
Mr. Gallaway is married and has a son and a daughter. Furthermore he has five cats. He is very active in the Odd Fellows and it was through his initiative, working through that organization, that the libraries in the Old Folks Home at Mattoon, Illinois, and in the Orphans’ Home at Lincoln, Illinois, were established. He has a large library of his own and includes in it many rare and old books of considerable value. It seems rather characteristic that his favorite author should be Charles Dickens. Not so characteristic, that his favorite poem is “The Raven.” His one great hobby is astronomy, a difficult subject in which he is well versed. For pastime, he has a summer home at Lake Wauconda which affords him a great deal of pleasure.
Mr. Gallaway has been accused, and with justice, of being a “silver-tongued orator.” He enjoys the sound of polysyllables and full-phrased sentences. His knowledge of imposition (technical sense only) is second to none.
A character most genial, kindly and large-hearted, Ed Gallaway has one desperate aversion: He hates automobile salesmen.

The Lakeside Press, Jan. 1923, p. 10

WILBUR EDGERTON SANDERS

Wilbur Edgerton Sanders was born in Ohio in 1861, the son of Wilbur Fisk Sanders and Harriet Peck Fenn Sanders. At the age of two, in 1863, he journeyed with his parents to Bannack, Idaho Territory, as part of the Edgerton party. His father practiced law, first in Virginia City and, later, in Helena. Wilbur Fisk Sanders was one of the leading Republicans in the territory and state and held several elective offices, culminating in his selection as one of the first U.S. Senators from Montana. Wilbur E. Sanders was educated at public schools in Helena; at the Philips Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire; and at the Columbia School of Mines in New York City. He returned to Montana after graduation in 1886. He worked in the field of mining as a mine superintendent, a shift boss, an assayer, a laborer, and a mine owner in Helena, Butte, and the surrounding area. Wilbur Edgerton Sanders retired to Berkeley, California, in 1923. He died there August 6, 1935.

You are a linguist. I want you to compare these texts from a linguistic point of view. Rather than focus on stylometry or other more mechanical statistical analysis methods, I want you to analyze the subconscious shape of the author's thoughts and the mental domains he uses for analogies. For example, look at argumentative architecture and logic flow. Compare and analyze the domains for metaphors and analogies. Add anything else you can think of that is an invariant to time and topic changes when it comes to author identification. The texts are on different subjects and in some cases decades apart in time. In other words, try to understand the mind of the author rather than the mechanical writing in which he expressed his thoughts. One particular challenge is that some texts are about 30 years apart. The writing style of an author can drift over that time.

The primary question we want to answer is whether Sanders or Gallaway could be the author of "The Expert at the Card Table" or "Jack Pots" or both. Are these four distinct authors? Is Eugene Edwards the same author who wrote under S.W. Erdnase? Who matches these texts better, Sanders or Gallaway? Be thorough in your analysis. Check and analyze all texts in their entirety.

RESPONSE

I treated all eleven complete files as the corpus, not just their introductions. In particular, I checked whether the patterns visible at the beginnings survive the technical middles and endings, because otherwise genre-specific openings could badly distort the comparison.

My overall conclusion is that Gallaway is substantially more compatible with both Erdnase and Edwards than Sanders is. Sanders has some real points of contact with Erdnase—especially spatial reasoning, mechanical exactness, and sensitivity to local conditions—but his deeper habits of organizing knowledge are quite different. The most intriguing correspondence in the corpus is actually Gallaway–Edwards, with Gallaway–Erdnase also quite strong. Edwards and Erdnase themselves are compatible in some deep respects, but there are also important differences that make me reluctant to identify them as the same writer solely from these texts.

The most useful way to explain why is to separate surface style from what I would call the writer's cognitive grammar.

1. The four cognitive profiles

The four corpora do not merely use different vocabulary. They habitually turn reality into different kinds of mental objects.

Writer	What the mind first sees	Typical reasoning movement	Typical failure model	Characteristic explanatory world
Edwards	people in situations	social generalization → example/story → comic or practical conclusion	folly, temperament, misplaced confidence, luck, social misreading	human nature, acting, law, politics, nationality, sport, military life
Erdnase	an operator inside an adversarial system	objective → constraints → exact procedure → concealment/detection test	suspicion, unnatural action, loss of control, exposure	business, education, art/craft, acting, predation, probability
Gallaway	a production process with interacting stages	operation → alternatives → downstream consequences → practical optimum	theoretical assumptions colliding with actual conditions, human variability, wasted time/cost	engineering, architecture, business, travel, medicine, circus, shop life
Sanders	a physical or historical system requiring classification	define whole → divide into classes → define parts → derive relations → qualify exceptions	force/material failure or inadequate evidence	mechanics, geometry, taxonomy; later classical/history imagery

That distinction remains surprisingly stable despite subject and date.

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2. Sanders: a mind that classifies before it acts

Sanders's most persistent mental habit is hierarchical decomposition.

In Mine Timbering and the Support of Earthworks, he does not begin by placing us beside a miner confronting a practical difficulty. He first establishes an ontology. Earthworks divide into engineering and mining earthworks; both divide into embankments, walls, and excavations; excavations divide again into surface and underground forms. He then repeats this procedure with support itself, dividing materials and formations into further classes. Sanders, "Mine Timbering and Support of Earthworks" (1902)

This is more than technical necessity. The same habit survives the drastic change of subject in Montana. There the object is a word rather than a mine, but Sanders again asks what category it belongs to, what grammatical object it modifies, what forms are logically possible, and how the noun/adjective relationship works. Sanders, "Montana" (1910)

That is an excellent example of the sort of time- and topic-resistant feature you were asking about.

Sanders's underlying question is often:

“What is this thing, what class does it belong to, what are its constituent parts, and what principles govern their relations?”

Once the taxonomy is established, he can reason extraordinarily precisely. In the 1904 shaft-framing article, for example, he establishes the parts of the frame, chooses one face of an imperfect timber as the reference plane, establishes a center/base line, and then projects all subsequent measurements from that invariant reference. Sanders, "The Framing of Rectangular Shaft" (1904)

This is characteristic Sanders thinking: establish a coordinate system first; reason from it second.

Even when confronting uncertainty, he does not abandon this architecture. His 1902 discussion explicitly says that practical experience and local conditions matter, and that local conditions determine local methods. But immediately after acknowledging this variability he reduces the underlying problem to gravity, pressure, resistance, and equilibrium. He then acknowledges that actual support is sufficiently uncertain that judgment and experiment remain necessary. Sanders, "Mine Timbering and Support of Earthworks" (1902)

So Sanders is emphatically not a naïve theoretician. His model is approximately:

principle → classification → physical derivation → local qualification.

That differs significantly from Gallaway's and Edwards's anti-theoretical practicalism.

Sanders's metaphorical mind

The technical Sanders rarely needs metaphors at all. His source domains are usually the literal mechanics of the problem: pressure, grain, planes, supports, directions, cross-sections, equilibrium. When analogy appears, it clarifies physical structure rather than social behavior.

The 1910 Montana essay proves that this is not simply an inability to write colorfully. Its opening is extravagantly literary: prehistory becomes the “Book of Time,” migration becomes tides and floods, pioneers pursue Golden Fleeces and Aladdin-like riches. Yet once Sanders begins the actual argument, the old cognitive machinery reappears: definition, grammatical classification, derivation, authorities, competing hypotheses, documentary evidence.

That makes the 1910 text particularly valuable here. It demonstrates exactly the phenomenon you anticipated: surface style can migrate enormously while deeper reasoning architecture remains identifiable.

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3. Gallaway: a mind that simulates a working system

Gallaway's fundamental habit is different.

He tends not to construct a taxonomy of printing and then descend through it. Instead, he mentally runs the job through the plant.

In the 1930 series the prospective estimator is trained by following a piece of work from the composing room into the pressroom and onward to the bindery. Knowledge consists largely of anticipating how a decision at one stage changes the circumstances encountered later. The imposing-stone man becomes valuable precisely because he is a “point of contact” among departments. Gallaway, Article Series (1930)

Gallaway therefore thinks in something like a causal simulation:

If I do X here, what happens later? What new operation becomes necessary? What time does that consume? Is the saving upstream larger than the new cost downstream?

His builder/architect analogy is revealing. The lockup man executes; the estimator mentally engineers the entire process before execution begins. Gallaway, Article Series (1930)

That is much closer to Erdnase than Sanders's ontology-building is.

The “human equation”

Even more important is Gallaway's refusal to model an ideal operator.

He warns that the expert compositor can be a bad estimator because he unconsciously estimates other people's speed from his own. Instead the estimator must remember “the human equation” and estimate the average compositor working under average conditions. Gallaway, Article Series (1930)

He repeats exactly the same mental operation when estimating presswork: do not ask how quickly the form could be made ready under favorable circumstances; ask how long it normally will take, including the ordinary failures, delays, bad material, incomplete instructions, and other “lost motion.” Gallaway, Article Series (1930)

That is a deep habit rather than printing terminology.

Gallaway thinks in real agents embedded in imperfect environments.

And his practical system is explicitly probabilistic rather than utopian:

ideal conditions do not occur; estimate the expected loss.

He says essentially that outright: ideal conditions “will never exist,” so the estimate should contain an allowance for average loss. Gallaway, Article Series (1930)

That mental habit is conspicuously close to both Edwards and Erdnase.

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4. Edwards: the same anti-idealism, but projected onto society

Edwards's book is structured almost oppositely from Sanders.

He does not normally define a phenomenon exhaustively and then enumerate its species. Instead he makes an observation about people, imagines or recounts a revealing situation, and lets the behavior establish the rule.

The opening chapter is almost entirely this kind of reasoning: national character, poker as a test of temperament, Germans, Frenchmen and Englishmen as social types, poker players as actors, officers as models of self-command, and finally the proposition that poker is distinctive because the player is playing other people rather than merely playing cards. Edwards, "Jack Pots" (1900)

That is Edwards's mental center: people interpreting people.

The subsequent twenty-plus chapters repeatedly instantiate the same architecture. Courts, politicians, women, children, policemen, professional gamblers, superstitious players, soldiers, Westerners, foreigners and practical jokers become experimental subjects. The “argument” is very often a human case.

Even technical subjects are socialized.

When Edwards reaches the rule governing split openers, he quotes the theoretically tidy solution that players should discard in order and rejects it because actual humans do not behave that way:

“This is a theory, not a condition.”

He then mentally runs an actual game: one player hesitates, another discards early, somebody picks up the unused cards, someone mixes them to see what he would have drawn. The theoretically neat evidentiary trail immediately disappears. Edwards, "Jack Pots" (1900)

That little passage is disproportionately important to this comparison.

It is a very Gallaway-like act of thought.

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5. The remarkable Gallaway–Edwards “condition / theory” parallel

Gallaway, nearly thirty years later, faces a pricing controversy. He refuses to resolve the abstract theoretical proposition at all. What matters is the actual circumstance facing the estimator:

he is confronted with “a condition—not a theory.” Gallaway, "How to Price Job Printing" (1929)

Edwards:

“This is a theory, not a condition.” Edwards, "Jack Pots" (1900)

I would not treat that phrase alone as an authorship marker. It could be proverbial or independently generated. We do not have enough material here to determine its wider circulation.

What makes it interesting is that the expression describes an independently visible habit in both corpora.

Both writers repeatedly contrast:

what a rule says ought to happen
with
what ordinary human beings and physical systems actually do.

And both enjoy puncturing an authority who has confused the two.

Gallaway's wonderful attack on the erroneous 24-page printing claim is exactly this kind of performance. He first mock-elevates the offending prose as a “classic in epistolary erudition,” says it has apparently been “filtered through a hat,” invokes a “phantasmagorical imagination,” and then destroys it with practical shop mechanics, ending in circus contortionists and Kankakee. Gallaway, Article Series (1930)

That humor is quite close to Edwards's characteristic mechanism:

mock solemnity → inflated language → concrete practical absurdity → colloquial deflation.

It is also relevant to Erdnase.

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6. Erdnase: not a classifier but an adversarial systems thinker

Erdnase's technical precision can initially make him look Sanders-like. But I think this is misleading.

The organizing question in Erdnase is not primarily:

What kinds of card manipulation exist?

It is:

How can an operator produce a hidden result while everything visible remains compatible with ordinary play?

That gives the whole book an adversarial architecture.

His central concept is not dexterity per se. It is the management of another person's inference.

The Introduction makes this explicit. Card-table manipulation differs from conjuring because all behavior must harmonize with ordinary game procedure; the slightest irregularity can create suspicion. Practical understanding therefore requires actually taking the cards and reproducing the process. Erdnase, "The Expert at the Card Table" (1902)

This is then formalized as “Uniformity of Action.” True and false shuffles, cuts and deals must have the same outward form. The observer is continually present in Erdnase's mental simulation. Erdnase, "The Expert at the Card Table" (1902)

That is not Sanders's characteristic cognitive environment.

Sanders asks whether the structure withstands the force.

Erdnase asks whether the hidden structure withstands intelligent observation.

That is much nearer Gallaway's process simulation, except that Gallaway's hostile variable is wasted time/cost while Erdnase's hostile variable is suspicion.

Erdnase's characteristic optimization

Again and again Erdnase compares possible methods using multiple constraints simultaneously:

naturalness, visibility, speed, difficulty, risk, customary movement, opportunity, and dependency upon other manoeuvres.

His “greatest single accomplishment” discussion is telling. Bottom dealing cannot simply be declared the best method because it depends on knowing and retaining bottom cards; retaining them requires blind shuffling; the cut creates another problem; palming may substitute for an ally but is riskier. Erdnase, "The Expert at the Card Table" (1902)

That is systems reasoning through dependencies, not merely a catalogue of techniques.

Gallaway does essentially the same kind of thing when changing one production choice alters press time, stock handling, makeready, folding, plates and cost.

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7. Erdnase and Gallaway share an unusually similar epistemic instinct

Gallaway's introductory promise is revealing:

no “hard and inflexible theories”; the reader retains the right to think for himself. Gallaway, "Estimating for Printers" (1927)

Erdnase repeatedly makes the same distinction operationally. One particularly clear sentence comes in the legerdemain section:

“In theory” a change appears easy to notice; “in practice,” when properly incorporated into a natural movement, it becomes almost impossible to detect. Erdnase, "The Expert at the Card Table" (1902)

More fundamentally, Erdnase declares that he is supplying “the facts and conditions of our subject as we find them,” not reformist theory. Erdnase, "The Expert at the Card Table" (1902)

Thus all three—Gallaway, Edwards and Erdnase—show a related epistemic reflex:

abstract prescription is distrusted until tested against actual operating conditions.

Sanders believes in practical judgment too, but his formulation is different. He begins with general physical principles and then says local conditions modify their application. Sanders, "Mine Timbering and Support of Earthworks" (1902)

That difference is subtle but, for authorship purposes, potentially significant.

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8. The humor fingerprint

Humor is particularly useful here because technical subject matter suppresses it rather than generating it.

Sanders

Sanders is overwhelmingly earnest. Even when writing ornate literary prose in 1910, he elevates rather than mocks. His classical and epic imagery is meant seriously.

I find very little evidence for the habitual comic collision of elevated diction and vernacular that is so obvious in the other three corpora.

Edwards

Edwards constantly inflates and punctures. He gives ridiculous events mock-solemn framing, treats low-stakes poker as heroic tragedy, applies legal, military, religious and political dignity to comic card-table incidents, and repeatedly ends anecdotes by collapsing the elevated frame.

Gallaway

Gallaway does this even while teaching estimating. “Stipendiary emoluments,” “princely salaries,” “cultural endeavor,” “epistolary erudition,” “phantasmagorical imagination,” and a Ringling Brothers contortionist appear alongside very earthy shop talk. Gallaway, Article Series (1930)

This is not merely “both authors are humorous.” It is a more specific shared machine:

pretend gravity + polysyllabic inflation + deliberately mundane reality.

Erdnase

Erdnase's version is more compressed and acid. The preface's “hypocritical cant,” “mealymouthed pretensions,” postgraduate education for the crafty and naked admission that the author needs the money are built on the same high/low collision. Erdnase, "The Expert at the Card Table" (1902)

He likewise moves comfortably between “philosophy of the stoic” and “grow chesty” or “slop over.” Erdnase, "The Expert at the Card Table" (1902)

Of the known writers, Gallaway supplies the clearest bridge between Edwards's expansive comic voice and Erdnase's compressed sardonic one.

That is one of the strongest qualitative reasons I take Gallaway seriously.

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9. Edwards versus Erdnase: where the same-author hypothesis works

There are genuine deep similarities.

Both understand poker fundamentally as a contest involving the opponent's model of you.

Edwards says the larger part of poker is “playing the players,” associates successful poker with acting, and repeatedly explores facial expression, emotional control, bluffing, reputation and the management of appearances. Edwards, "Jack Pots" (1900)

Erdnase turns the same general insight into a technical science. His uniformity principle, deportment, suppression of emotion, avoidance of conspicuous dexterity, and “effect of suspicion” are essentially an engineering treatment of the same second-order psychology. Erdnase, "The Expert at the Card Table" (1902)

Both therefore reason recursively:

I act → he observes → he forms a belief → I must shape my action with that belief in mind.

That is more significant than shared poker vocabulary.

They also share an irreverent attitude toward authority, an enthusiasm for practical knowledge, a willingness to shift from formal vocabulary into slang, and an attraction to the contrast between naïve certainty and experienced knowledge.

So Edwards = Erdnase is not linguistically absurd at all.

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10. But Edwards and Erdnase also differ in a way I consider important

The deepest difference is not style. It is where the writer spontaneously locates complexity.

For Edwards, complexity resides in people and stories.

For Erdnase, complexity resides in procedures under adversarial constraints.

Even when Edwards finally devotes a chapter to crooked gambling, he presents the information through another person—“an expert”—and immediately converts technical explanation into personality and anecdote. His professional cheats become occupational types: paper man, hold-out man, second dealer. Edwards, "Jack Pots" (1900)

Erdnase does almost the reverse. The people rapidly disappear into the mechanics.

This distinction becomes particularly striking because Edwards's chapter on card cheating is adjacent in subject matter to the entire Erdnase book. If the same author produced both books only two years apart, this is the best place to look for the hidden expert surfacing.

Instead there is a considerable gap.

Edwards's description of professional technique is relatively impressionistic. His quoted expert even defines a second dealer as someone capable of dealing “from any part of the pack,” then describes glimpsing and extracting useful cards in ways that are very loose compared with Erdnase's sharply differentiated systems.

Erdnase, by contrast, distinguishes tiny procedural variants according to whether an action is natural, whether the deck is under observation, where a cut occurs, whether cards can be restored during normal procedure, and how a false action is made indistinguishable from its genuine analogue.

That does not prove different authors. A journalist writing a popular poker book could intentionally suppress specialist knowledge or put deliberately simplified material into a quoted source.

But under the cognitive-fingerprint method you proposed, it is negative evidence.

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11. Their moral posture also diverges

Edwards begins his crooked-gambling chapter by saying there is “no pleasure at all” in poker unless it is square, and repeatedly distinguishes the enjoyable legitimate game from cheating. Edwards, "Jack Pots" (1900)

Erdnase deliberately rejects precisely that sort of moral framing. He announces that he is neither reforming gamblers nor sympathizing with victims; serious players, in his view, are all seeking “the best of it.”Erdnase, "The Expert at the Card Table" (1902)

This is not decisive authorship evidence because pseudonymous personae can be constructed precisely to permit contradictory attitudes.

But it increases the cost of an Edwards = Erdnase hypothesis. One must posit not merely a different genre but a deliberately different ethical narrator.

That is possible; it should not be silently assumed.

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12. Why Sanders's technical similarity to Erdnase is weaker than it first looks

If we compared only technical passages, Sanders would initially appear attractive.

Both writers care about tiny details. Both can describe hand/tool geometry. Both reduce an operation to sequential movements. Both think about the direction of force. Both repeatedly distinguish theoretically possible from practically advisable methods.

The crucial difference is the shape of their abstraction.

Sanders repeatedly converts a messy world into stable categories and geometric reference systems. The 1904 framing article is almost a perfect specimen: establish the parts, choose the true face, establish the datum line, derive every other location from it. Sanders, "The Framing of Rectangular Shaft" (1904)

Erdnase instead converts the situation into a dynamic interaction between visible and hidden states.

He asks questions such as:

What does the observer expect?
What movement would ordinarily occur now?
Can the illicit movement be embedded in it?
Does this method require an unnatural posture?
Can the cards subsequently be restored during a legitimate handling of the deck?
Does the speed change?
Will suspicion survive even without proof?

That is much less Sanders-like than the shared technical vocabulary initially suggests.

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13. Analogy domains as evidence about thought

The metaphor source domains also separate the writers.

Writer	Dominant imported domains	What that suggests
Edwards	theater, politics, military behavior, law, nationality, courtship/social status, hunting, religion	understands poker by mapping it onto human social life
Erdnase	business/profit, schooling, artistic craft, theater, hunting/predation, social status	treats deception as both profession and cultivated art
Gallaway	engineering/architecture, commerce, travel, agriculture, medicine, circus/theater, literature	habitually translates technical production into vivid ordinary-world models
Sanders	overwhelmingly mechanics/geometry in technical work; epic/classical imagery in history	technical cognition stays close to the literal physical system

The important point is not merely that Gallaway uses more metaphors than Sanders. Gallaway's metaphors repeatedly cross the same high/low cultural boundary that Edwards and Erdnase enjoy crossing.

Sanders's 1910 literary expansion proves he has a broad cultural storehouse, but he deploys it reverentially and historically rather than as comic deflation.

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14. Reader models

Another fairly deep invariant is the imaginary reader each author carries around.

Sanders's reader needs a complete conceptual map and correct terminology.

Gallaway's reader is a working man who can learn judgment by following real cases and comparing estimates with actual outcomes.

Edwards's reader is a companion at the table or club whom the narrator wants to amuse while conveying worldly knowledge.

Erdnase's reader is an apprentice who must physically reproduce the manoeuvre until conscious rules become embodied action.

That last point is important. Erdnase repeatedly wants knowledge to migrate from explicit cognition into motor habit. Stocking calculations should become literally “at his fingers' ends”; a method can ultimately be executed correctly even by someone unable to explain why it works.

Gallaway exhibits an analogous pedagogical instinct. His students must work problems themselves, show the method rather than merely the answer, and acquire judgment from mistakes and from subsequent comparison with actual production. His 1928 exercises explicitly insist that copying answers defeats the purpose and that “It is only by making mistakes that we learn.” Gallaway, "Problems in Estimating" (1928)

Sanders teaches information and principles extremely well, but this iterative apprentice-learning psychology is much less central.

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15. Error correction is particularly diagnostic

Each writer has a distinctive answer to “How do we learn that our model was wrong?”

For Sanders, the world applies force. A support fails, an assumed pressure proves inaccurate, or evidence contradicts a historical route. Revise the engineering/historical model.

For Gallaway, the job comes back with an actual time sheet. Compare estimate with reality and adjust future judgment. Gallaway, Article Series (1930)

For Erdnase, the observer detects or begins to suspect something. The method was insufficiently natural; redesign the action.

For Edwards, somebody gets called, outdrawn, cheated, embarrassed, or made ridiculous. Human confidence collides with experience.

Gallaway and Erdnase are especially close in seeing expertise as a continual feedback loop between planned procedure and actual performance.

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16. What survives the thirty-year gap?

The Sanders corpus gives us the best internal control.

His 1899–1906 technical prose and 1910 historical prose can look like different writers if one concentrates on ornament, vocabulary and sentence atmosphere. Yet beneath that drift, the same mind is visible:

classification, explicit definitions, constituent parts, logical derivation, qualified exceptions, evidence hierarchy, and concern for exact relations.

That gives us permission to discount some obvious differences between Gallaway in 1927–30 and an hypothetical Gallaway in 1900–02.

If Gallaway were Edwards or Erdnase, I would not expect identical vocabulary thirty years later.

I would look instead for:

theory-versus-condition thinking; process simulation; concern with exceptions and “human equation”; learning from actual operations; pragmatic optimization; comic high/low register shifts; and impatience with grand abstractions that ignore how work is really done.

Those features are indeed present.

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17. Pair-by-pair assessment

Here is how I would characterize the authorship compatibility from this corpus alone.

Proposed identity	Cognitive compatibility	Main supporting evidence	Main difficulty
Sanders = Edwards	Low	practical experience; occasional frontier subject overlap	fundamentally different organization of thought; Sanders classifies structures, Edwards dramatizes people
Sanders = Erdnase	Low–moderate	precision, mechanics, procedural description, local-condition reasoning	Sanders is taxonomic/first-principles; Erdnase is adversarial/procedural; humor and social psychology differ strongly
Gallaway = Edwards	Moderate–strong	condition-over-theory reflex, human-behavior realism, case reasoning, comic high/low diction, practical anti-authoritarianism	Edwards is much more socially anecdotal and temperament-centered
Gallaway = Erdnase	Moderate–strong	systems/process reasoning, details, practical conditions, iterative skill acquisition, optimization, sardonic register	Gallaway models production/economics and averages; Erdnase models concealment, motor action and adversarial observation
Edwards = Erdnase	Moderate	shared poker psychology, appearance/reality, acting, emotional control, irreverence, practicalism	dramatically different information architecture; Edwards's cheating chapter seems surprisingly unspecialized beside Erdnase; moral narrator differs
Gallaway = Edwards = Erdnase	Possible and genuinely interesting	Gallaway contains traits that separately resemble both pseudonymous voices and could bridge their genre difference	requires substantial persona/genre shifting, and direct Edwards–Erdnase differences remain

I would not turn those descriptions into numerical probabilities. The corpus is much better suited to comparative compatibility than calibrated probabilities.

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18. Who matches Erdnase better: Sanders or Gallaway?

Gallaway.

This is the clearest comparative result I get.

Sanders resembles Erdnase at the level most likely to arise from technical subject matter: exact description, spatial mechanics, practical qualification.

Gallaway resembles Erdnase at a deeper level:

he mentally executes a process before it happens;
he evaluates alternatives through interacting constraints;
he thinks small details can determine the outcome;
he distrusts idealized systems;
he expects human variability;
he teaches through embodied practice and feedback;
and he combines elevated, sometimes polysyllabic diction with blunt vocational slang and sardonic humor.

Those are harder to explain merely by both men being technical writers.

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19. Who matches Edwards better: Sanders or Gallaway?

Again, Gallaway, and by an even wider margin.

Sanders's Montana proves he could leave technical prose and write vividly, but its vividness is historical-romantic. Edwards's imagination is comic-social.

Gallaway's humorous prose, on the other hand, repeatedly operates very much like Edwards's: a practical man watches someone make an absurd claim, mock-seriously elevates the absurdity, and then demolishes it with a concrete counterexample.

The extraordinary “theory / condition” correspondence strengthens an already existing cognitive resemblance rather than creating it. Edwards, "Jack Pots" (1900) Gallaway, "How to Price Job Printing" (1929)

Of all the cross-author comparisons in these files, Gallaway–Edwards is the one I find most provocative.

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20. Is Eugene Edwards the same author as S. W. Erdnase?

My answer from this method is:

plausible, but the texts do not make it the most natural conclusion.

There is enough common mental territory that I would not treat them as demonstrably distinct. The psychology of poker in Jack Pots can certainly be regarded as a popular, social version of the observer-management principles formalized by Erdnase.

But if I knew nothing about publication circumstances and simply compared the cognitive structures, I would probably separate them.

Edwards naturally asks:

“What do people do, and what amusing truth about human nature does it reveal?”

Erdnase naturally asks:

“What sequence of actions produces the required hidden state while preserving the visible appearance of normality?”

Those are related minds, but not obviously one mind.

The most troublesome evidence for a single-author theory is Jack Pots Chapter XXII. Given the near-perfect subject overlap, one would expect Erdnase's peculiar operational sophistication to leak through strongly there. Instead Edwards remains the raconteur interviewing/describing an expert.

That does not rule out deliberate camouflage. It simply means that the hypothesis requires camouflage.

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21. Are there four distinct authors?

I would not say the linguistic evidence establishes four distinct authors.

It supports one separation much more strongly than the others:

Sanders stands apart.

The other three occupy a more closely related cognitive region: practicalism, suspicion of abstract rules, human-performance realism, humorous collision of high and low registers, and preference for knowledge earned through experience.

Within that region, however, Edwards, Erdnase and Gallaway still have distinguishable centers of gravity.

So my best synthesis is not “clearly four authors,” but neither is it “clearly Gallaway wrote all three.”

I would describe the corpus as showing roughly three cognitive poles:

Sanders: classificatory/structural/first-principles.
Edwards: social/anecdotal/human-nature.
Erdnase: adversarial/procedural/operator-centered.

Gallaway is unusual because his known writing overlaps the latter two poles. His technical mind resembles Erdnase's process engineering; his practicalist humor and human-equation thinking resemble Edwards.

That is precisely why Gallaway emerges as the stronger candidate.

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22. My resulting authorship picture

If I had to make the historical identities disappear and judge only the mental architecture of the texts, I would infer that Sanders is probably independent of both pseudonymous card writers. His similarities to Erdnase look more like the common consequences of engineering competence than a shared individual cognitive fingerprint.

I would regard Gallaway as a serious linguistic-cognitive fit for Erdnase, substantially better than Sanders.

I would regard Gallaway as an even more striking fit for Edwards, especially because Gallaway's known technical prose unexpectedly contains the same kind of comic anti-theoretical practicalism one finds throughout Jack Pots.

I would regard Edwards = Erdnase as possible but not positively demonstrated. Their shared worldview is real; their modes of thought are different enough that I would want independent evidence before merging them.

And I would regard the hypothesis Gallaway = Edwards = Erdnase as much more linguistically coherent than Sanders = either pseudonym, but still as a hypothesis requiring an explanation for the striking change from Edwards's anecdotal outsider-like treatment of crooked manipulation in 1900 to Erdnase's extraordinarily intimate technical treatment in 1902.

That last two-year transition, more than the thirty-year Gallaway gap, is in my view the central linguistic problem that a single Edwards/Erdnase/Gallaway authorship theory has to solve.

Bottom line

The strongest result from this corpus is not a word-frequency resemblance but a resemblance in epistemology.

Gallaway, Edwards, and Erdnase repeatedly distrust a neat rule that has not survived contact with actual conditions. They model real people rather than ideal agents. They value experiential knowledge. They enjoy puncturing pretension. They move easily between educated diction and occupational slang. They teach through cases in which a small overlooked circumstance reverses the expected result.

Sanders is also practical, but his subconscious architecture is different: he wants first to establish what the system is, divide it correctly, identify the forces or evidence acting upon it, and derive the result from those relations.

So, on the particular “mind behind the prose” test you proposed, my present ordering is:

Gallaway is much closer than Sanders to both pseudonymous card texts; Gallaway–Edwards is the most striking cross-corpus resemblance, Gallaway–Erdnase is also substantial, and Edwards–Erdnase is suggestive but internally more conflicted than one might expect if they were unquestionably the same writer.