About the authors

Born William John Warner in Dublin, he took the stage name Cheiro — from cheiromancy, the old word for palmistry — and, later, an invented title: Count Louis Hamon. By his own account he learned palmistry, astrology, and Chaldean numerology from a Brahmin teacher in India as a young man, then returned to London to build a practice reading the hands of anyone who could afford him.

He became the most famous society palmist of his era, working London, New York, and eventually Hollywood, and kept a guest book of sitters who signed their names beside a comment on the reading. His lasting technical contribution is the timing grid still used to anchor predictions to a sitter's age, and a classification of hand shapes that most palmistry writers after him kept using. He was also, by his own account, a showman — so Palmist takes his framework seriously and his certainties less so.

Gettings came to palmistry as a historian rather than a practitioner. His major work, The Book of the Hand: An Illustrated History of Palmistry (1965), traces the tradition from antiquity through the classical texts to his own century, weighing which claims actually survive scrutiny and which were simply repeated from book to book. He is the most careful of the three about the line between what can be observed in a hand and what has merely been asserted about it.

Outside palmistry he wrote widely on esoteric and art history — occult symbolism in painting and sculpture, the sigils of alchemists and astrologers, and a well-regarded study of the illustrator Arthur Rackham. Where a reading in Palmist sounds hedged, it is usually because Gettings hedged first.

Bashir was born in Kashmir in 1907 and moved to London in 1948, where he became the city's leading professional palmist for decades. His approach was closer to fieldwork than showmanship: he built a library of more than fifty thousand handprints and worked alongside physicians and criminologists studying what a hand could reliably show and what it couldn't.

He wrote in both English and Urdu — his first book, How to Read Hands (1955), appeared in Urdu as Ramoz-i-dust shunasi — and his later The Art of Hand Analysis (1973) is the most attentive of the three to minor signs: islands, chains, breaks, sister lines, and how they change in a hand over a life. He's also part of why Palmist offers readings in Roman Urdu and Urdu, not only English.