Cracking Magic—Part 6: Material

This should help you make the right choices. We must under­stand that the tricks and books I sug­gest are my opin­ion and your tastes may vary. But this is writ­ten with the occa­sional per­former in mind, who does not have the end­less time to read everything.

Quality books

I don’t want to demean any authors of magic books with these sug­ges­tions. It is dif­fi­cult to write about some books you like and not feel guilty about not men­tion­ing oth­ers. But then I have to make some choices and offer some mater­ial that I would sug­gest as a start­ing point.

In magic we have an amaz­ing amount of lit­er­at­ure and mater­ial at our dis­posal. It is very dif­fi­cult to make a selec­tion. That is why I sug­gest stick­ing to proven and qual­ity authors in the begin­ning. If you read the books and are informed, you will find that often a new trick in a recent pub­lic­a­tion has a pre­cursor in an older book. And most of the time that pre­de­cessor is even bet­ter than the newer one. Dig­ging around in the old books will bring some nug­gets to the sur­face, tricks that still work as well today as they did then.

A few dec­ades ago there was a trend to pub­lish books that were col­lec­tions of tricks from dif­fer­ent authors. Titles like “100 Tips for Magi­cians” were com­mon. I love those books or pamph­lets! Nobody reads them any­more, so there is a lot of mater­ial out there that can be used as inspir­a­tion or adap­ted to mod­ern times.

One such book is “100 Latest Tips on Tricks” by Mil­bourne Chris­topher. There are 100 use­ful tips to incor­por­ate into your act. Some are gags, some are exten­sions of known tricks, and some are new tricks or hand­ling. I found over 20 tricks and ideas in this book­let that I could use in my work, so it’s not a bad invest­ment. The book­let is only $10.00 and you can get it at Library.com.

If you work with Gene Ander­son’s A‑B-C list sys­tem (check out his excel­lent lec­ture notes called ‘The Part-time Pro’), each trick on the A list could even have its own little note­book. The trick on the A‑list is worth a note­book in itself! You might end up with ten note­books if your act includes those ten tricks, but then you will have them all in one place and, more import­antly, the trick will live. It is more fun to do the work of keep­ing a trick up to date when you have a note­book and see it filling up with improve­ments and more ideas. It is like hav­ing a diary of a trick. Or doc­u­ment­ing the evol­u­tion of a trick.

Later you can add more note­books: gags, pat­ter, present­a­tion, routines, tricks, spe­cials, whatever. But for now, just start with the three. If you have more at the begin­ning, you will prob­ably get too involved in pre­par­ing empty note­books and waste your time think­ing about per­fect organ­isa­tion sys­tems and themes. Stay calm and dare to start with just three. We can make a daunt­ing task fun and enjoy­able by tak­ing a small first step. Three little note­books, small as they are, will get the job done and even make you feel like a ‘con­queror’, a win­ner. That is what we want.

You will be sur­prised how much valu­able inform­a­tion you will store in the next few days. The work is done! You are on your way because you star­ted your archive with three little note­books. It was­n’t too difficult.

For me, this sys­tem works because the focus is on these few note­books and not on the vast amount of inform­a­tion on my com­puter (which some­times makes me feel help­less and unin­formed). As I said, for me the com­puter is just a place to store and research the inform­a­tion I might need to write my ideas in my notebooks.