decova

The title says it all. But it does­n’t mean that you should rip punch­line after punch­line while per­form­ing magic (although of course you can do that). Rather, I mean the stage set-up or the per­form­ance area and how to organ­ise your props so that you can per­form the whole act stand­ing up at the micro­phone stand.

The goal is clear. A micro­phone stand to which I have attached a few props that enable me to per­form a show that lasts about forty minutes. And that on the smal­lest plat­form, pos­sibly sur­roun­ded by spectators!

The microphone stand

This is the most import­ant part of the set-up, as it has (besides the micro­phone) a small table top and a hook for a paper bag to hold props.

Of course, work­ing with a stand micro­phone requires prac­tice, but the effort is worth it, because you are free of trans­mit­ters, receiv­ers and head­sets. Another advant­age is that a wired micro­phone is less sus­cept­ible to inter­fer­ence. In com­bin­a­tion with one of the mod­ern loud­speaker combi-boxes, you have your com­plete sound equip­ment, includ­ing back­ground music, com­pactly with you and are not depend­ent on the build­ing ser­vices. The ideal solu­tion for smal­ler per­form­ances at wed­dings or sim­ilar events.

The tabletop

Mine is made of 4 mm ply­wood, which I covered with black felt. I prefer the round shape because then I don’t get stuck at the corners and can move around the micro­phone stand bet­ter. There is a slightly lar­ger hole in the plate (there could be two) into which I can put, for example, two polycar­bon­ate pint glasses stacked inside each other. With this I can per­form a stand-up ver­sion of the map walk or other tricks with glasses. The plate is attached to the stand with a glass holder for micro­phone stands (music store).

The paper bag

This serves as a stor­age place for lar­ger props and at the same time as a col­lec­tion con­tainer for used props. I got myself a nice paper bag and rein­forced it with card­board on the inside. I made sure that it could be fol­ded flat to save space in the suit­case. It’s more dur­able that way and it’s easier to add a few com­part­ments to keep the props reas­on­ably tidy.

This bag hangs from a head­phone bracket that you can attach to a tri­pod. You can get head­phone hold­ers like this (and a decent micro­phone stand) at any well-stocked music shop.

The bull­dog clip

This is also very easy to attach to the micro­phone stand and is very prac­tical if you want to place a large envel­ope with a pre­dic­tion on dis­play in a clearly vis­ible place.

Suggestions for effects

By the way, I recom­mend my work­book 80/20 for this, in which you will find over a hun­dred sug­ges­tions for effects with the simplest props that take up little space but are still vis­ible to many audi­ence mem­bers and have a good effect.

Here are a couple of sug­ges­tions to get you started:

• Dis­ap­pear­ing micro­phone (Finn Jon)
• Cut and restored micro­phone cable
• Three ring routine (or Dai Ver­non Sym­phony of the Rings)
• Com­edy Prediction
• Chinese Sticks
• Torn and restored newspaper
• Rope routines
• Bank­note in lemon
• Egg bag
• Invis­ible Deck
• Ring on stick
• Ring Box (or ring in nest of bags)
• Water in Newspaper
• Super­quiz (Bor­etti)
• Torn & restored tis­sue paper with mock explan­a­tion (JUNO)
• Silk in apple (de Cova)
• Express card trick (de Cova)

There are so many tricks that can eas­ily be per­formed stand­ing at a micro­phone stand and can fill a small stage very well.

There are tons of books, courses and even blogs ded­ic­ated to self-organ­isa­tion. But for magi­cians and their magic-spe­cific needs, there isn’t a lot of inform­a­tion out there.

Over the past few years, I have helped other magi­cians cre­ate their acts and shows, and one thing I have noticed is that they seem to be dis­or­gan­ised. When they have a show date, panic sets in. They rush to the magic store, find the props, decide what they are going to do, get the stuff together and drive to the venue exhausted. We have known all this for a long time.

An end­less array of books, e‑books, notes, DVDs, props, tricks, gim­micks and whatever else fills their cup­boards, base­ments and gar­ages. They seem lost under the pres­sure of inform­a­tion over­load. Most of us have already lost track of what we have accumulated.

So I star­ted this mini-series on the aspects of get­ting organ­ised in magic: how to select mater­ial, archive it, val­id­ate it, improve it, learn it, rehearse it, build it into an act and per­form it.

We will go through all the steps to bring some order to the chaos. If you join me (and it only takes a few minutes a day that you would oth­er­wise waste on Face­book or social media), you will be sur­prised at the pro­gress within the next month.

You will be organ­ised, have a clear plan for your act(s) and have all the mater­ial ready to use. You will cer­tainly have more fun with your magic.

I am not aim­ing this little series at seasoned pro­fes­sion­als who already have their organ­isa­tion in place. I am aim­ing it at the “help­less” ama­teur, most of whom have a demand­ing job, fam­ily, friends, another hobby and a social life. They can­not devote all their time to magic. This is the ulti­mate “magi­cian’s hacks series”—a crash course in how to make your magical life easier without sac­ri­fi­cing your magical qual­ity. Sav­ing time, money, energy and frus­tra­tion is the goal.

What needs to be organised?

Col­lect­ors are organ­ised: They know what to col­lect, where to put it, and they have already archived their col­lec­tions in some way. There is no need to tell them what to do. Things are dif­fer­ent for the cas­ual hob­by­ist. Too much stuff on the magic mar­ket, too much already bought and received, too much to sort out. I believe that in order to get organ­ised in magic you need to think about the fol­low­ing issues:

1. Choice
2. Acquisition
3. Validation
4. Archive/Store
5. Modification
6. Exercise
7. Rehearsal
8. Performance

It all boils down to build­ing an archive that you will use as a crafts­man would use his tool­box. In this archive there will be sub-cat­egor­ies: lit­er­at­ure, video, audio, moves, tech­niques and props. Inform­a­tion on how to present your routines.

I will cover every aspect of this and give you sug­ges­tions, tips and hacks that will make your life easier in no time.

The first step

The first step with any change is know­ing that it is neces­sary. So you have to acknow­ledge the fact that your cur­rent organ­isa­tion is crap and you are liv­ing with a magical mess. And you have to want to change it. That is your choice, but if you have read this far, I assume you have pleaded guilty and made the change.

And here is the first piece of advice: stop buy­ing magic now (books, ebooks, down­loads, DVDs, tricks or whatever). It does­n’t have to be forever, but for the next time, until your archive is ready and you’ve learnt the tech­niques of selec­tion, and until you’ve installed your organ­isa­tional system.

As the Chinese pro­verb goes, “You can­not fill a cup that is already full”. Don’t fill your cup with use­less mater­ial, it’s already too full. You need an empty cup to put some­thing new in.

Let’s take a look at this mon­ster called the Archive. You are going to build one from scratch. Much bet­ter than wast­ing time try­ing to get an over­view of the mess you already have. This will be your new archive, rep­res­ent­ing your new life as a mage. And you will want to build it right from the start.

It needs to be a work­ing archive. So you need a sys­tem that is easy to use and struc­tured. Noth­ing in there that is just dead weight. The sim­pler the sys­tem the bet­ter. The basic idea with this new archive is to focus on sim­pli­city and ease of use. There is noth­ing wrong with the stuff you already have, but for­get about it for the moment. Pre­tend you don’t have it.

I will describe things the way I do them. This sys­tem has evolved after much exper­i­ment­a­tion with mixed res­ults. This cur­rent sys­tem works very well for me, but feel free to change it as much as you like. It is flex­ible. I divide the archive into three sec­tions: know­ledge, props and skills. Each sec­tion requires a dif­fer­ent approach. This is where I store everything that comes along the way.

Knowledge

Here we have everything that has to do with inform­a­tion. Prin­ted mater­ial, digital mater­ial, per­sonal notes, his­tor­ical stuff. Any­thing that can be clas­si­fied as know­ledge about magic.

Props

The title says it all. Here we organ­ise the phys­ical accessor­ies we need for our magic: tricks, gim­micks, ward­robe, trans­port­a­tion, addi­tional mater­ial, tools and replace­ment mater­ial. Everything you need to prac­tice your magic.

Skills

This is not a phys­ical stor­age space. This is your col­lec­tion of routines, moves, tricks, feints, pat­ter, gags and routines that you can (or want to) per­form. It is what you can already do. This archive shows where you stand as a per­form­ing magician.

It also needs to be organ­ised, as some tech­niques may need con­stant refresh­ing (memo deck, sleight of hand, remem­ber­ing set-ups, etc.) and some sleight of hand tech­niques need to be kept ‘sharp’. To learn a new tech­nique, some plan­ning and organ­isa­tion is essential.

Your archive should allow you to cre­ate small acts, routines and tricks with the mater­ial you already have (or the range of magic tech­niques you have at your dis­posal). It should allow you to assemble, prac­tise and per­form them without wast­ing time. It per­son­al­ises the archive for your skills, equip­ment and interests in magic.

A quick look at my usual archive work­space. Everything you need for a prac­tical archive is here.

Now we will dis­cuss two tools that are use­ful for build­ing our archive. These are few and may dif­fer from what you are already using. Again, very few and simple categories:

Com­puter
Note taking
Storage
Exercise

Almost every­one has a smart­phone, tab­let, laptop or other com­puter. Stor­age is easy, and the capa­city and pos­sib­il­it­ies are almost end­less. One reason most of us have more stuff on our devices than we ever need. Maybe it is the greed to own all that inform­a­tion and “valu­able” PDFs, DVDs, etc. This greed is a hindrance, and with all this stuff comes con­fu­sion and clutter.

Some might say: “Yes, but maybe I need it”. Maybe you will, but not at this stage of build­ing the archive. What we need now is a blank canvas.

I have met magi­cians who have a NAS server at home, and they have shown me how they can con­nect to it from any­where (in fact, they showed me this dur­ing a break in a lec­ture). They were proud that they could access all the ISOs and PDFs. But what for? Is it essen­tial to have access to all this at all times? I don’t think so.

What we need is a very simple digital stor­age sys­tem for our archive. I use an old 13″ Mac­Book. All my archive and work mater­ial is on it. All the magic and ideas that are rel­ev­ant to me. One place, one device. I back it up in the cloud and on an external hard drive. But the tool I work with every day is this simple old notebook.

I upgraded and installed a 500GB SSD drive and 8GB of RAM. That is enough speed and power to get the job done. But even a smal­ler net­book would be excel­lent, provided you can con­nect it to some sort of stor­age device to share the data.

The whole point is to have a sep­ar­ate device for archiv­ing that has noth­ing to do with your reg­u­lar com­puter peri­pher­als. The idea is to save time by not being dis­trac­ted by the func­tion of the main com­puter: the inter­net, social media, films, etc.

It should be small and handy, easy to under­stand and use, and (most import­antly) free of dis­trac­tions. And it should be small and port­able, yet have a proper key­board for typ­ing. The reason for this is that when I am read­ing a book or work­ing on some­thing, I have it next to me to take notes or jot down ideas. When I travel, I have it with me. So it should be small and light, but still work like a good typewriter.

The other argu­ment for hav­ing an extra device is to main­tain an over­view of the archive. I know that all my magic stuff is on the device, and I know where it is on the device. The aim is to have no other magic routines, PDFs or whatever on any other device. This makes my archive clean, search­able and effi­cient to work with. No time wasted look­ing for things. It is all in one place.

Software

I don’t use too much soft­ware for my archive. The most import­ant is the soft­ware I use to take my notes. I have found Sim­ple­n­ote to be per­fect for me. It is (as the name sug­gests) very simple in all respects: the inter­face is bare-bones, the text is without fancy styl­ing and extra fea­tures, it has full-text index­ing and I can tag the notes.

One of the main advant­ages is that it is fast. Cre­at­ing a new note is just one click and that’s it. Type in your con­tent and for­get about the rest. The moment you type it, it is saved. It is a work­horse designed for the real world.

I can store the con­tent in the cloud (although it is also stored loc­ally), which means I am pro­tec­ted against los­ing the data. Sim­ple­n­ote is free and a per­fect, straight­for­ward choice. Go to their web­site and see for your­self. Sim­ple­n­ote is freeware.

As my eBook col­lec­tion has grown over the years, I have bought Devon­Think, which is a very pro­fes­sional solu­tion. But you don’t need that to get star­ted. To start with, it is enough to put your PDFs in your file sys­tem (more on this in a later post).

One thing you will need is a decent text editor. I don’t use Word, but the free­ware altern­at­ive Lib­reOf­fice. This will do for almost any task. It is fast, ver­sat­ile and con­nects you to the Word world. But I don’t use it too much.

For typ­ing my scripts, I have been using the CeltX soft­ware for years. It is very use­ful. I can format all the scripts as I type, I don’t have to think while I write, and there are lots of other use­ful fea­tures (like note-tak­ing, index cards) that make writ­ing a play or script a breeze.

Now, with the advent of the Mark­down lan­guage, I use After­writ­ing (you can find it at www.afterwriting.com). It is open source, very easy to use and has now replaced the CeltX soft­ware for me.

And you need a PDF reader, like Acrobat Reader or some­thing, to access the PDFs. I have kept the require­ments to an abso­lute min­imum. Most mod­ern note­books and oper­at­ing sys­tems like LINUX have everything I need for my archive already on board.

I use my small archive com­puter only for

• stor­ing digital pub­lic­a­tions (PDF, eBooks, DVD, audio)
• tak­ing notes
• writ­ing scripts
• the invent­ory list
• some research

I have no fancy soft­ware installed. Just the basics, so as not to dis­tract from the main tasks of my archive.

So get that old note­book back from your kids (the one you gave them because it was ‘so good’ and enough for them). It is more than adequate for your archiv­ing task.

To remove any tempta­tion, delete everything on that note­book that has noth­ing to do with the archive. You want to start with an empty and vir­gin space for your archive.

But remem­ber that the com­puter is not the most import­ant part of the archive. But a use­ful and time-sav­ing one.

Did­n’t I men­tion in the last art­icle that the com­puter is not my most import­ant tool for archiv­ing, here is one of the most import­ant tools (besides the brain): note­books. Not the elec­tronic kind, but the real paper kind.

I have been using Mole­skine Cash­ier Note­books (pocket size) for years. Before I switched to these small note­books, I used much lar­ger note­books. I hoped that big­ger note­books would pro­duce more and more import­ant ideas. How wrong I was!

But first, why Mole­skine? They are more expens­ive, but then — they last almost forever because of the super­ior qual­ity. And that was what I wanted: a longer life for my note­book. The fin­ish and feel is bey­ond any­thing else, and it is a pleas­ure to work with. The pocket size with soft cov­ers makes them port­able and they fit in almost any bag. It is the qual­ity, the brand and the way they look and feel. And because I spent a lot more money on them, I will treas­ure them more than a cheap spiral-bound note­pad. [I have since switched to Leucht­turm 1917 note­books. The Mole­skin paper qual­ity sucked when they dropped the paper to 70gr/qm and had it made in China. ] 

They come in dif­fer­ent col­ours, which I like. I use sev­eral in dif­fer­ent col­ours: one for each cat­egory. One for ideas, one for action, one for prob­lems to solve, etc. This makes it easier to find the right note­book (and it looks nicer on the desk).

Later, when work­ing with the Gene Ander­son A‑B-C list sys­tem, each trick from 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 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.

A few tips on note-taking

There are dozens of inform­at­ive web­sites and blogs about note-tak­ing, and I am sure you already have your sys­tem. For those who do not, here is my way. Rather than have you scour the inter­net and waste time, here is my sum­mary and short­cuts that should get you started:

One notebook — one category/topic/trick

When I start a new note­book, I leave the first page blank. When it fills up, this is the place to add a title, a short descrip­tion of the con­tent and a short table of con­tents. This makes it easy to nav­ig­ate through the note­books later.

At the top of the first page, each entry will have the date and some tags.

Doodles and draw­ings are allowed and even encour­aged. Poor hand­writ­ing can be a hindrance years later when try­ing to identify what I wrote. It does­n’t mat­ter how crude the scribbles are — only you will see them.

Use Post-it notes and book­marks for easier ori­ent­a­tion and flex­ib­il­ity. The Post-it can be removed, moved, dis­carded and expan­ded. I can move them from topic to topic. There is always the pos­sib­il­ity of mak­ing them ‘per­man­ent’ and trans­fer­ring the con­tent to the note­book later. Post-its and book­marks are some of my most valu­able tools (along with the note­books themselves).

Use col­our. Text mark­ers, col­oured pen­cils, felt pens and so on. The more col­our the bet­ter. The brain likes colour.

Why handwriting?

No need to go into detail here. Prof Richard Wise­man has already done the sci­entific work for us in his book ’59 Seconds’, where he touches on this sub­ject (and as the book title prom­ises, it only takes two minutes to learn).

The reason I hand­write new ideas is to speed up the pro­cess of integ­rat­ing them into my brain. As I write, I am already wrest­ling with the idea, and much of the cre­at­ive pro­cess begins with the writ­ing itself. A huge time saver!

It is a proven fact that writ­ing or draw­ing by hand is much more effi­cient than typ­ing into a com­puter. So most of my work is done by hand in the note­books. Eighty per cent of my rel­ev­ant work is done this way. All the time.

The way I see it, in the com­puter, all the fant­astic ideas and inform­a­tion are invis­ible, hid­den some­where in files that are hid­den in the file sys­tem. Those ideas exist as a digital file, but I can­not see them like a drop of water in the ocean.

In the note­books, how­ever, the simple act of flip­ping through the pages makes the ideas vis­ible in a frac­tion of a second. The inform­a­tion has come to life and can be read, touched and looked at.

Why the smaller notebooks?

The reason (apart from prac­tic­al­ity) is brev­ity. As we all know, ‘brev­ity is the soul of wit’. How true! A great way to get used to brev­ity in note-tak­ing is to reduce the amount of writ­ing space! So simple and effect­ive. Hence the smal­ler format.

Take advant­age of a major pro­ductiv­ity hack: Par­kin­son’s Law. Par­kin­son’s Law states that work expands to fill the time avail­able to com­plete it. If you have less time to com­plete a task, you’ll increase your effort. In our case, note-tak­ing will be much more con­veni­ent and prac­tical if the space allot­ted for notes is smal­ler and does not allow those notes to ‘expand’.

The second point is that you save time. Filling a small page is quicker than try­ing to fill a page four times the size.

Thirdly, there is less res­ist­ance to writ­ing, which is the most import­ant thing in a notebook.

Kick start

So what do you do with all this for your archive? The most dan­ger­ous enemy lurk­ing at the begin­ning is intim­id­a­tion. You look at all the files other people have and think: “I’ll never have that. It will take forever, so where do I start?”

Put those ques­tions and self-doubts in the bin. Start the easy way and don’t think about what archives oth­ers have or don’t have. Think only of your little archive, the most import­ant in the world. Get three Mole­sk­ines to start. Start small. Use the first three cat­egor­ies, one note­book for each topic:

Know­ledge
Props
Skills

Know­ledge: Write down routines, tricks, sys­tems, pro­ced­ures and any­thing else that is excit­ing and import­ant for you to know and for your act.

Props: make a note of the props you are inter­ested in and any ideas you might have to modify them to make them more per­sonal to your act. Make a list of the props you would like to have. Draw. Scribble. Col­our. Invent. Think and then design the ‘hard­ware’.

Skill: Think about the neces­sary tricks and tech­niques you will use or need to be able to per­form. Rethink your tricks and look for where tech­niques are used or needed. Research the tech­niques you need to do your tricks. Find bet­ter ways, write them down. Write down what you need to prac­tise or learn. Think of this note­book as a to-do list.

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 top­ics. 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.

Conventions and lectures

Once you have star­ted put­ting your ideas and stuff into these note­books, they can be use­ful (even in this embryonic state) when you next attend a lec­ture or con­ven­tion. Just have the note­books with you, and when you see some magic, think of your note­books, test whether the new inform­a­tion could be use­ful to you, and if so, add it to your note­books. The books act as a guide for you.

They will pre­pare you to get all the rel­ev­ant inform­a­tion you need from the event. The note­books will help you focus on your mater­ial — no more distractions.

And that is the secret behind the secret!

Now that we have the little note­book or whatever, it is time to give it some struc­ture. Here is the sys­tem I have been using for years and it has proven to work.

The idea is to keep the num­ber of sub­folders as small as pos­sible. In the begin­ning I made the mis­take of cre­at­ing one sub­folder after another, think­ing that this would be a “per­fect” arrange­ment. I dis­covered that this led to a com­plete mess and I had trouble find­ing what I was look­ing for because I for­got which sub­folder I had put it in. So everything had to be simplified.

Here is the struc­ture: there are seven main folders. In each of them is a sor­ted array of sub­folders. These are the sub-folders where I keep the actual files. Here are my main folders (in top order):

01 — books
02 — tricks
03 — video
04 — performers
05 — scripts
06 — ideas
07 — con­struc­tion area (undefined material)

A brief explan­a­tion may be neces­sary. I only use seven main folders because I read that the human brain can­not pro­cess more than seven pieces of inform­a­tion at once. So I stuck with the mys­tical num­ber seven.

The folder titles are self-explan­at­ory. The 01 — books have a sub­folder struc­ture of folders named after the alpha­bet. So it will look like this

01 — Books
A -
B -
C -
D -
and so on to Z

The same goes for folders 02, 03 and 04 (of course you can change this as much as you like). So if I have some­thing for the archive, let’s say an ebook with a routine by Tam­ariz, it goes into 01 — books -> T. I put a copy of it into 01 — tricks. OR it could go to folder 04 — per­formers -> T. You decide which way you want to go.

You could make some sub­folders in the 02 — tricks folder by adding the cat­egor­ies cards, coins, rope, silks, kid show, men­tal­ism if you like. It would look some­thing like this

02 — tricks
Cards
A -
B -
C -
D -
and so on to Z

Coins
A -
B -
C -
D -
and so on to Z

Men­tal­ism
A -
B -
C -
D -
and so on to Z

Stand up
A -
B -
C -
D -
and so on to Z

Com­edy
A -
B -
C -
D -
and so on to Z

I use this simple struc­ture to get to any entry with a max­imum of three clicks. So if I am look­ing for the Tam­ariz trick, I either go to 01 — Tricks -> Cards or (bet­ter) I go to 04 — Per­formers -> T and then I should be able to get the name very quickly.

Even more import­ant than the actual folder struc­ture is the way I name the files. In the begin­ning I was­n’t very good at this because I did­n’t think it was import­ant. Now I have learnt that proper nam­ing can be a real help in organisation.

Tam­ar­iz’s ebook would be named like this:

Tam­ariz, Juan — ebook — name_of_the_publication.pdf

If you come up with a nam­ing sys­tem, you will be able to scan what you have and find it in no time. Nam­ing gives a real struc­ture to your archive. It will also make it easier to find things using your com­puter’s built-in search function.

Tam­ariz, Juan — ebook — name_of_the_publication.pdf

Tam­ariz, Juan — ebook — name_of_the_publication.pdf

Tam­ariz, Juan — DVD — name_of_the_publication.mp4

Tam­ariz, Juan — DVD — name_of_the_publication.mp4

Tam­ariz, Juan — trick — name_of_the_publication.pdf

The best thing to do is to start renam­ing your exist­ing data from the begin­ning, or every time you move a new file into your archive. For me, it has become a habit to do this when I buy some­thing new for the archive. I change the file name as soon as I down­load it into the folder.

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.

I am not sure if this is because times have changed. Or people have changed. Maybe both.

I have been lec­tur­ing for almost 40 years now. My begin­nings as a lec­turer in 1984 were mod­est. I gave my first talk and explained (in detail) exactly three tricks/routines. That was it.

Over the years I improved and added more to the lec­ture. Because I saw what the other instruct­ors were doing, the ones from across the pond, they showed and explained their routines and then they SOLD stuff!

Some­thing new in those days; the people attend­ing the lec­tures will­ingly paid for the new ‘stuff’.

Nowadays, a lec­ture has mutated into a sales event. The only reason to hold a con­fer­ence seems to be to sell the goods pre­pared for it.

The ‘fee’ paid for a talk has been reduced to almost noth­ing. The organ­isers insist that the lec­turer has the ‘chance’ to make her money by selling. And that she should be grate­ful to the club/organisation for allow­ing her to do so.

Mean­while, the audi­ence for talks has changed. What used to be a gath­er­ing of magi­cians (people inter­ested in the art of magic) now con­sists of ‘lay­men’ who have only a mar­ginal interest in magic. People who have dis­covered magic as a new hobby, a leis­ure activ­ity and a chance to show that they are special.

See the audi­ences gathered at hun­dreds of live lec­tures and at-the-table events. See the DVD series of some of the major pro­duc­tion com­pan­ies in our industry. See how magic is made ‘com­mer­cial’ in these pro­duc­tions. Do you see the change?

Now it seems to be more about social­ising at live lec­ture events, the ego boost of show­ing up and all the gos­sip. Buy­ing the latest stuff is part of the routine.

Where does all this lead?

It forces cre­at­ors to ‘cre­ate new stuff’ to sur­vive in this shark pool. Some cre­ate magic and gim­micks that are not needed. Just for the ‘mar­ket’, just for the cus­tom­ers (who buy the crap).

The appre­ci­ation for clas­sic, solid cre­ations that have stood the test of time (and are still bet­ter than most of the new stuff) has diminished.

These people talk about pro­gress in magic and evol­u­tion of tech­nique. But they are only inter­ested in some­thing ‘new’. Some­thing that tickles their fancy and sat­is­fies their curiosity.

Because they are not real magi­cians, they are not into the art, they are just cas­ual vis­it­ors. How could they know what makes good magic, some­thing that oth­ers have spent a life­time dis­cov­er­ing and practising?

The industry helps. Tricks, ideas, con­cepts and routines are being ruth­lessly ripped off by unscru­pu­lous magic com­pan­ies. They have no respect for cre­at­ors and their intel­lec­tual property.

I love the expres­sion: 90% of everything is crap. When I take a close look at our industry, I have to come to the con­clu­sion that 90% of the magic industry is crap.

Sad. But true.

Most suc­cess­ful people have morn­ing rituals. There are fixed times in the early morn­ing where they execute import­ant things: they write, prac­tise, think, or workout. All suc­cess­ful people have this habit. I learned that Ron McMil­lan used to go through his whole manip­u­la­tion act once (full-dress rehearsal) before he went to work. Every morning!

My morn­ing ritual con­sists just of prac­tising moves. These are quick and dirty run-throughs of tech­niques that have to be sharp and must be com­mit­ted to my muscle memory. I decided the even­ing before what I would prac­tise. All props are there so I can start without hesitation.

I go through the moves in rapid suc­ces­sion, without overthink­ing them. It is only a repe­ti­tion prac­tise and not about learn­ing some­thing new. I aim at going through the moves 20–30 times. The whole pro­ced­ure lasts about half an hour. That’s it.

After only a short time, you will notice a sig­ni­fic­ant change. The import­ant thing is to get this down as a daily habit. Once it is a habit, you won’t see the time spent on these moves. Each ses­sion is short-time-practising.

You will notice a dif­fer­ence in per­form­ance. After a while, you will have com­mit­ted the tech­niques to muscle memory and can execute them tech­niques without thinking.

And that is neces­sary for a relaxed and flaw­less performance.

Here is a small refine­ment to the hand­ling of a card-to-wal­let routine, with the pur­pose of obscur­ing the moment of load­ing of the card into the wal­let. I’m sure oth­ers have come up with this, as it’s such an obvi­ous idea. So I don’t claim any ori­gin­al­ity. Think of it as a reminder of some­thing import­ant (not just for the Card to Wal­let trick).

The basic idea here is to get the audi­ence used to the action of the hand reach­ing into the jacket for the wal­let. Once they are con­di­tioned to this action, and see that noth­ing unusual or sus­pi­cious is hap­pen­ing, they will miss (or worse, ignore) the moment of actual loading.

The­or­et­ic­ally, if you make this move two times, and they see that noth­ing sus­pi­cious is hap­pen­ing, then they won’t notice it the third time. Again, the magic three.

To make this pos­sible, restruc­ture your routine. Include a (motiv­ated) reason that allows you to reach in, remove the wal­let, and then remove some­thing from the wal­let that is related to the routine. This could be a note, a piece of paper (with some­thing writ­ten on it that is part of the present­a­tion), or really any­thing that would help the routine.

The hand­ling is as fol­lows: You reach into your pocket, take out your wal­let, open it and take out a piece of paper with your other hand. While the paper is being unfol­ded and shown around, the hand hold­ing the wal­let closes it and puts it back in the pocket.

Do the same thing a second time with a dif­fer­ent object in the wal­let (or put the slip of paper you took out before back in). The third time, hold the card in your palm and reach for your wal­let with that hand. Take out the card, remove the wal­let, and then go on to reveal the card in the sealed envel­ope in the wal­let’s zipped com­part­ment, etc.

This con­di­tion­ing, inno­cent as it may seem, is a reli­able strategy. It cov­ers the moment.

Some time ago I got hold of these eBooks by Mark Els­don. Two things dawned on me after read­ing them.

Not that I don’t have some under­stand­ing of magic. I’ve read a lot of books and magazines on the sub­ject. But because Mark showed me what I had overlooked!

To me it is a mir­acle that one per­son can have such a vast col­lec­tion of mater­ial. You will find 100 hand-picked items from Mark’s per­sonal notebooks/collection in each of these eBooks (there are four of them now). Things that are some­times bor­ing to read or inno­cent in appear­ance, but have a huge impact on real world performance.

The beauty of the col­lec­tions is that Mark is a con­sum­mate per­former and has tried out most of the routines and tricks. His com­ments on how and why are invaluable.

Not only will you have tons of unknown and exquis­ite routines and ideas at your dis­posal, but you will also have to do a lot of work to dig through your lib­rary and find the routines that Mark has poin­ted out.

If you’re going to do that, and if you’re look­ing for some dif­fer­ent mater­ial to show, then these eBooks are for you. I prom­ise they will keep you busy for some time. At the very least, you will want to try every item of interest, assemble the props and study them. 400 items to find, try and think about is a lot of work!

In the end, someone did the right thing: not to pub­lish ‘new’ stuff we don’t need, but to point out the mater­ial we already have in our books and magazines.

Fant­astic mater­ial just wait­ing to be redis­covered. The title ‘Hid­den Gems’ is more than apt. The Hid­den Gems will change your work­ing repertoire.

You can get them here:
http://elsdon.blogspot.com/2019/06/hidden-gems-4-brand-new-enchiridion-of.html?m=1

There is a trick in the book ‘The Card Magic of Paul LePaul’ that has fas­cin­ated me since my youth: it is the ‘Cards and Envel­ope Mys­tery’. The effect is that four signed Aces dis­ap­pear from the deck and appear in a sealed envelope.

It is a great trick — it has a simple plot, and the con­struc­tion is as simple as pos­sible. The hand­ling is straight­for­ward, and there is noth­ing com­plic­ated about it. OK, you use an advanced sleight of hand to steal the cards from the deck, turn them over and then put them in the envel­ope. But that keeps away the ‘magi­cians’ who are only inter­ested in self-work­ing material.

I offer a vari­ation of the ‘Diag­onal Palm Shift’ (DPS) that makes a dif­fer­ence. Work­ing per­formers will notice that the hand­ling is much smoother.

Set-up

My pre­par­a­tion of the envel­opes is the same as LePaul’s trick. I use the torn envel­ope because I can give it to the spec­tator at the end. I think the torn envel­ope pre­par­a­tion is still the most prac­tical method.

Most of the time I use a trick wal­let that con­tains the envel­ope. For more formal present­a­tions, I use the clas­sic method (described in the book) with the pile of envel­opes. Roberto Giobbi describes his vari­ation and hand­ling in one of his books; read it — it’s excellent.

There’s not much to change about this clas­sic method. It is the most dir­ect way.

The Move

The spec­tat­ors sign the four cards. While they are doing this, four indif­fer­ent cards are placed face up in the middle of the deck. I use a cas­ual and straight­for­ward ‘Braue Reversal’ for this.

I replace the signed cards in the deck, which I square and turn face up. Now I per­form the DPS. The basic hand­ling is the same as the clas­sic DPS, but I have added a simple move that puts the deck in the cor­rect pos­i­tion to be spread out on the table.

This is done after the DPS, when the deck is turned face up, just before it is spread out on the table. Import­ant here is the pos­i­tion of the left fin­gers, which have to grip the deck in a cer­tain way.

The first fin­ger is curled up on top of the deck. The other fin­gers are at the front end of the deck on the under­side. The deck can be gripped in this way without the help of the thumb (which rests near the inner end of the deck).

After per­form­ing the DPS, the left hand imme­di­ately takes the deck between the fin­gers and lifts it up and for­ward, turn­ing it face up. The deck is then placed in the deal­ing pos­i­tion in the right hand, over the cards in the palm. This provides good cover.

The tilt of the deck provides cover from the front. The left hand lifts the deck. The video shows how this move looks like:

After a short pause, the left hand takes the deck from the right hand and moves for­ward towards the table. The deck is then spread wide so that the spec­tat­ors can see the four reversed cards in the centre of the spread (pre­sum­ably the four Aces).

The deck is ready to be taken and spread out on the table.

The left hand, with the cards in the palm, goes into the pocket to remove the pile of envel­opes, load­ing the signed Aces.

If you watch these move­ments, you will see that all the actions are nat­ural and seem inno­cent. It seems as if the right hand is simply turn­ing the deck face up in pre­par­a­tion for spread­ing the cards on the table.