SOLIDMAGIC

90% of Everything is Crap.

Crack­ing Ma­gic (7) — Se­lec­tions

by

This and the fol­low­ing art­icles should be of some help in mak­ing prop­er se­lec­tions. Of course, it must be un­der­stood that the tricks and books I will sug­gest are purely my per­son­al opin­ion and your taste may vary. Don’t for­get, this is writ­ten with the cas­u­al per­former in mind, who does not have end­less time or the nerves to read them all.

Qual­ity Books
I don’t want to de­grade any au­thors on ma­gic books with my humble sug­ges­tions. It is dif­fi­cult writ­ing about some of the books one likes and not feel­ing guilty of not hav­ing men­tioned oth­er au­thors. On the oth­er hand, I will have to make some de­cisions and of­fer some ma­ter­i­al I would sug­gest for a start­ing point.

In ma­gic, we have an astound­ing amount of lit­er­at­ure and ma­ter­i­al at our fin­ger­tips. Mak­ing a se­lec­tion is very dif­fi­cult. There­fore, in the be­gin­ning, I sug­gest stick­ing to time proven and qual­ity writers. When you read the books and are in­formed, you will no­tice that many times a “new” trick in a re­cent pub­lic­a­tion has a pre­curs­or in an older book. And most of the times, this pre­curs­or is even bet­ter than the “new” one. Dig­ging trough the “old” books will bring some nug­gets to the sur­face, tricks that still work today as good as they did then.

The key is that in these times, tricks were pub­lished and de­scribed only after they had been ac­tu­ally per­formed for many years for an audi­ence (at least the ma­jor­ity of them). What you get with the older books is ma­ter­i­al that has proven to be work­able. There are lit­er­ally no pipe dreams.

When hav­ing only lim­ited means and time to put to­geth­er a work­ing lib­rary, I would sug­gest first and fore­most go­ing for the “clas­sic text­books” of ma­gic. If you are in­ter­ested in sponge ball ma­gic, then read­ing Frank Gar­cia’s “En­cyc­lo­pe­dia of Sponge Ball ma­gic” is a good start. Here you have as­sembled in one place some good ma­ter­i­al that will keep you busy for a long time.

The same with the clas­sic texts on coin ma­gic, card ma­gic and so on. I tend to be­lieve that the clas­sic books like “Ex­pert Card Tech­nique” or “Great­er Ma­gic” were care­fully writ­ten and there is a lot of ad­vice con­cern­ing psy­cho­logy and present­a­tion in them. “Great­er Ma­gic” is still a fant­ast­ic col­lec­tion of the best ideas of the best ma­gi­cians at that time. Do­ing just the stuff out of  “Ex­pert Card Tech­nique” will make you shine as a card star. And the chapter about present­a­tion is worth pure gold.

If you want to make a deep study of card ma­gic, then prob­ably Roberto Giob­bi’s “Card Col­lege” series is the best choice. Just don’t think too much about it, be­cause everything Roberto pub­lishes is re­fined to the nth de­gree and you will have sure­fire win­ners in your rep­er­toire. A very in­ter­est­ing read is his “Ask Roberto” eBook. He presents an ex­cel­lent list of “es­sen­tial read­ing” books and ma­ter­i­al.

A very good ad­dendum to your archive, which you can work with on a daily basis, is Rober­to’s “Secret Agenda”. In there are 365 tips, hints, ideas and wis­dom. One for every day. Roberto tips price­less in­form­a­tion there.

As you see, I tend to “en­cyc­lo­ped­ic” type of books for my archive. But it has­n’t to be the big, heavy books, there is a “smal­ler” way as well.

In the forties and fifties, it was pop­u­lar to pub­lish books that were col­lec­tions of tricks by dif­fer­ent au­thors. Book titles like “100 Tips for Ma­gi­cians” and the like were quite com­mon. Many of these tricks were ex­trac­ted and re­prin­ted from the “big” books and works. So the au­thor did the work of se­lect­ing and search­ing stuff from a spe­cif­ic top­ic for you already and they are served on a golden plate for you. I love these book­lets! Be­cause al­most no one is read­ing them any­more, the ma­ter­i­al will ap­pear fresh and trust me, there is a ton of ma­ter­i­al that sparkles in­spir­a­tion or can be ad­ap­ted to mod­ern times and used right away.

One of those is, for ex­ample, the book­let “100 Latest Tips on Tricks” by Mil­bourne Chris­toph­er. In there are 100 use­ful tips to be in­cluded into your act. Some are gags, oth­ers are ex­ten­sions of known tricks and oth­ers are new tricks or hand­ling. When read­ing this book­let, I found more than 20 (!) tricks and ideas that I could (and prob­ably will) use in my work, which is­n’t a bad in­vest­ment at all. The book­let is only $10.00 and you can get it at Library.com.

So, go to the Lybrary.com and search for these au­thors (of course, there are lots more, but we have to start some­where):

Mil­bourne Chris­toph­er
Jean Hugard
U. F. Grant
Peter War­lock
Hen Fetch
Roy Baker
Ken de Courcy

The ma­ter­i­al they pub­lished on vari­ous top­ics is very worth­while to have a look at. An­oth­er nice thing is there are lots of ideas for the stand-up per­former, an area that is­n’t too well covered in these mod­ern times, des­pite the fact that in the real world, what we need (and could use) mostly is an act that is suit­able for an audi­ence of about 50 to 100 spec­tat­ors. There is tons of stuff for that oc­ca­sions in these book­lets.

Also, in former times, there have been lots of “com­pil­a­tions” pub­lished. You will find a lot of titles like “100 Tricks With A Thumb­tip”, “100 Tricks and Ideas With A Milk­pitch­er” and the like. Well worth look­ing into these as well. Dig­ging out the nug­gets that oth­er­wise would re­main hid­den.

Con­cern­ing the top­ic of put­ting an act to­geth­er, a fant­ast­ic in­spir­a­tion for that is a book­let by Max Hold­en called “Programes of Fam­ous Ma­gi­cians”. Here you find de­scrip­tion of the acts of some fam­ous (and not so fam­ous) ma­gi­cians of that time. A very in­ter­est­ing an in­spir­ing read to get an act to­geth­er. Also there is a book­let by Sen­or Mardo, called “The Act”. Here are some ideas and sug­ges­tions as well. The point is that these little book­lets get you star­ted some­where. Oth­er­wise, the search for tricks for a pro­gram could turn out to be a nev­er-end­ing one …

The Se­lec­tion
Now when you have some of these book­lets, read through them care­fully. Ideally, print them out so you can use the pen­cil and the colored text mark­er to high­light and com­ment the in­ter­est­ing stuff. Then, ap­ply the BSL to the ma­ter­i­al. After that, put the in­ter­est­ing stuff into your little note­books.

Your archive will now start to grow in no time.

NEXT ARTICLES

mccovas_rabbit