Alexander de Cova

In the past years I observed that quite a lot of magi­cians were search­ing for ref­er­ence mater­i­al on mis­dir­ec­tion. Here I offer a col­lec­tion of book sources. The books lis­ted below have helped me most and shaped my think­ing about mis­dir­ec­tion. These books should get you a good start.

Sam C. Sharpe – Psy­cho­lo­gic­al Secrets for the Conjuror

For me, this is the most detailed list­ing of mis­dir­ec­tion tech­niques ever. Sharpe details and cat­egor­ises the skel­et­on of mis­dir­ec­tion and explains it. Des­pite the fact that it is some­times quite dif­fi­cult to read and under­stand, it is price­less. This book has been my num­ber-one book on the top­ic for many years (and will remain so). This is abso­lutely essential.

A good way would be to start your stud­ies with this book, under­stand all the prin­ciples explained and then dive into the oth­er books. This will make the points in the oth­er books much clear­er to you. Sharpe’s book gives a sol­id found­a­tion and a frame­work to work in. You can and will then attach more know­ledge (flesh) to the bones Sharpe gave us.

The order of the list­ing has noth­ing to do with the sig­ni­fic­ance of the books.

Al Leech – Don’t Look Now

A little book­let where Al Leech explains some of the basic and most import­ant tech­niques. The con­tent is aimed at the card man, work­ing in close-up sur­round­ings. Nice and well written.

Al Schneider – The Decep­tion of Magic

This is a mam­moth tome, and Al goes into the depth, using a sci­entif­ic approach. You will learn a lot from the chapter on mis­dir­ec­tion. One thing to point out is his dis­cus­sion on the spectator’s per­cep­tion, where he intro­duced the ‹ARL› (Auto­mat­ic Response Lib­rary). This is based on the latest sci­entif­ic researches and res­ults and is very inter­est­ing to read (and import­ant to know).

Joe Bruno – Ana­tomy of Misdirection

This is an inter­est­ing little book with some strange tricks (routine) in there. For my taste, the con­cepts are valu­able, but explained in a way that is quite hard to fol­low (at least for me).

Lewis Gan­son – The Annot­ated Magic of Slydini

I prefer this book over the ori­gin­al one because this edi­tion con­tains the annota­tions of Dr. Gene Mat­suura, which clear up things and expand the volume. The essence of Slydini’s mis­dir­ec­tion is found in this book and very well explained. You will learn to under­stand the under­ly­ing prin­ciples and how to apply them to the routines. Excel­lent book.

Patrick Page – The Life and Times of Albert Goshman

No dis­cus­sion about mis­dir­ec­tion is com­plete without men­tion­ing Albert Gos­h­man. He was a mas­ter of this. In the book, you will find a detailed explan­a­tion of the com­plete ‘Salt and Pep­per Shakers’ act. The only way to get some bene­fit from it (con­cern­ing mis­dir­ec­tion) is to actu­ally go through the act with props and a sim­u­lated per­form­ing situ­ation. then you will get the routine con­struc­tion and under­stand where, why and how Albert con­struc­ted and applied misdirection.

Patrick Page – On Misdirection

This was a little book­let Pat sold at his lec­tures. As typ­ic­ally for Pat, the descrip­tions are brief, crisp and to the point. He gives some prac­tic­al advice and examples which illus­trate the points. This is not a ground-break­ing exhaust­ive essay, but a good primer. And you get two ter­rif­ic tricks/​principles out of it.

Steven Minch – The Books of Wonder

Every­body knows Tommy Won­der was a geni­us and a real deep thinker. In his fam­ous books are scattered a few the­or­et­ic­al art­icles, some of them deal­ing with mis­dir­ec­tion. these are worth the price of the two books alone. Highly intel­lec­tu­al and deep.

Arturo de Ascanio – The Magic of Ascanio

Ascanio was (is) one of the most influ­en­tial fig­ures of Span­ish magic. He was an ana­lyst, thinker, the­or­eti­cian and philo­soph­er. His thoughts are deep and pro­found. Whilst there are four books pub­lished by the Span­ish com­pany Pagi­nas, for me the volume one is the most import­ant. In this book you find some inter­views Juan Tam­ar­iz did with Ascanio and it is here where he goes deeply into the sub­ject of mis­dir­ec­tion. I con­sider this inter­view (it is a long one!) to be basic read­ing for any ser­i­ous magician.

Gary Kur­tz – Lead­ing with your Head

Gary is a very intel­li­gent and com­pet­ent per­former, author and thinker. His essay is heav­ily based on the Slydini con­cepts and you can see Gary has done his home­work. What I love with this book­let is that he illus­trates the con­cepts with a routine, show­ing exactly what he means and how the points are put into prac­tice. A very good and help­ful book.

Pass it on!

I abso­lutely hate writ­ing about this, but then we live in a mod­ern world, where copy­ing stuff is the nor­mal thing to do. I was ripped-off so many times that I don’t want to count any­more. I am sick of it.

But recently I learned of anoth­er copy that I really hate. It is about my beloved ‘Pre­mon­i­tion Box’. I cre­ated this tool in 1983, whilst being in Ber­lin and work­ing for Ted Les­ley in his com­pany. In these times, Ted per­formed Eddie Joseph’s fab­ulous effect Pre­mon­i­tion, which is the way I learned about this trick.

After hav­ing per­formed this many times, I had the idea to elim­in­ate the stor­age of the two decks in the pock­ets and use a spe­cially con­struc­ted card box. I built my first mod­el from card­board. Here is a pic­ture of that ori­gin­al box, the moth­er of them all (yes, I still have it and use it).

I con­struc­ted the spe­cial inlet, which cre­ates the illu­sion of only one deck being in play. The oth­er one is clev­erly hid­den under the side pan­el. The import­ant point is the addi­tion of the dice and the pen­cil. Both are actu­ally cut in half to save space for the deck under­neath. These half-cut items are what makes the box so decept­ive and they are truly unique fea­tures which dis­tin­guishes this box from oth­er deck switch­ing boxes.

The box looks the same on both sides and depend­ing on which side you open, there will be either deck no. 1 or deck no. 2 show­ing up. This is the prin­ciple and the con­struc­tion of my box.

I showed this box for the first time in a lec­ture at the Itali­an nation­al con­ven­tion in 1986 or 1987. So magi­cians have seen it since. I also did it in a lec­ture in Lon­don for Ron Mac­Mil­lan’s day way back at the end of the 80ties.

The Pre­mon­i­tion Box is also explained on my Eng­lish video tapes series ‘Treas­ures’ Vol. 1 (https://​www​.murphys​ma​gic​.com/​p​r​o​d​u​c​t​.​a​s​p​x​?​i​d​=​5​2​471). So there should be enough inform­a­tion around, even in Eng­lish spoken circles.

In 1993, I pub­lished the box in my Ger­man lec­ture notes. Here I had sim­pli­fied the con­struc­tion of the inlet. I think this was even bet­ter than the first ver­sion because there was no rim around the inlet. The L‑shaped inlet did the job well.

In 1992 the pub­lic­a­tion of my very first book in Ger­man lan­guage was due. It was called ‘Ein Profi packt aus’ and it con­tained the deck switch­ing box, of course. You can check this as well in Denis Behr’s data­base (http://​archive​.denis​behr​.de/​s​h​o​w​.​p​h​p​?​b​o​o​k​=​9​3​8​&​h​i​g​h​l​i​g​h​t​=​4​5​677).

It should be obvi­ous that I am the cre­at­or of this baby. The con­tract about the book, includ­ing the world­wide exclus­ive man­u­fac­tur­ing and dis­tri­bu­tion rights for all the tricks and gim­micks in the book was done between Rudolf Braun­müller and me. After his passing, his wid­ow Helga Braun­müller and her daugh­ter Claudia are still the copy­right hold­ers. That means no one is allowed to pro­duce and mar­ket this item (not even me without ask­ing per­mis­sion) except the Braunmüllers.

Now I found this in Joe Stevens Magic Emporium:

I could­n’t believe what I saw because I have known Joe Stevens Empori­um since the time I star­ted to work for Har­old Voit in the ZZM in the 80ties. I always thought them to be trust­worthy deal­ers, not selling any rip-offs. I was wrong.

So yes­ter­day I pos­ted this on the Face­book in the hope to make people aware of this illeg­al theft of ideas. It cre­ated some stir. After my harsh words against Joe Stevens Magic Empori­um, Mark Stevens imme­di­ately called me back and we settled the issue on good terms. I even bought the last three pieces of this rip-off he had on stock for myself. Strange, to buy back one’s own cre­ation! But then I will have the proof in my hands. Maybe the work­man­ship is good, then I have anoth­er work­ing box in my tools box.

Mark told me that they at the Empori­um do not know each and every trick out of the hun­dreds of tricks they have to handle and in stock. So, basic­ally, he had no idea that I am the invent­or of the box. Des­pite the fact that I believe a deal­er should know the stuff he is selling, I accep­ted his apo­logy and we settled the issue. I send him a copy of the lec­ture notes and now for me the thing with Stevens Magic Empori­um is good.

But then I saw this in an Indone­sian shop:

And, of course, the Pen­guins also are in the boat:

It appears that Stevens is not the only one. Sadly, quite a few deal­ers here in Europe, which I con­sidered friends, also went into the trap and are offer­ing the rip-off. I asked Mark Stevens about the supplier/​manufacturer, but he did­n’t know exactly from whom he got it. He men­tioned Murphy’s Magic Sup­plies. A check on their web­site revealed that they indeed list this trick, and it is the same as on the Indo­ma­gic­land website:

In all advert­ise­ments, there is abso­lutely no men­tion­ing of my name as the cre­at­or. Des­pite the fact that the concept was shown on the Treas­ures tapes years earli­er, nobody in this ‘magic com­munity’ noticed, as usu­al. Quite the con­trary: when read­ing the advert­ise­ment of the Indo­ma­gic­land web­site, you might come the the con­clu­sion that this box was inven­ted by Indo­ma­gic (‘Pre­mon­i­tion Box by Indo­ma­gic­land’). This makes me feel sad and angry.

Because it does­n’t make any sense to go into court with a com­pany in Indone­sia, there will be noth­ing left that I can do: just watch oth­er magic deal­ers with no eth­ics con­tin­ue selling my ideas and mak­ing a profit.

This is not a ‘magic com­munity’, but an assort­ment of crap people with no eth­ics and con­science. It is a shame and one of the reas­ons that I will retract from this scene. In the future, I will con­cen­trate on writ­ing this blog for the ‘com­munity’, in order to pub­lish my ideas and there­fore prove that I am the ori­gin­at­or. There are lots of very nice people out there in magic as well, and I don’t want them to be pun­ished because of the lousy deal­ers we have. I will write the blog for these nice people and con­tin­ue to give them ideas.

Will someone think of giv­ing a com­pens­a­tion to me for their sales? Prob­ably not. As usu­al. Take an idea, rip it off, man­u­fac­ture it and sell it. Don’t give a shit on the cre­at­or. Think of your own profit. We are a ‘com­munity’ and a deal­er must please and sat­is­fy his customers.

Don’t expect me to come to that con­ven­tion any­more, show­ing my stuff and then hav­ing it ripped off.

I am fed up with this.

Don’t pass it on!

Now at the begin­ning of a year, I always make my notes of all the dif­fer­ent lec­ture tours in Ger­many. 2017 will be a year like nev­er before. The MZvD (Magic Circle Ger­many), and some private lec­ture tour organ­isers, put up a sched­ule which is ridiculous!

This year there will be at least 9 magi­cians tour­ing Ger­many, Aus­tria and Switzer­land. I won­der wheth­er the clubs and their mem­bers have the time and the budget to handle all this, much less get­ting enough club mem­bers into the club for the events.

I won­der what the organ­isers think. Do they believe they are doing magic a favour with this? I don’t think that this is so. They are act­ively and con­sciously over-sat­ur­at­ing a small mar­ket. They are over­feed­ing and over­strain­ing the club mem­bers. If you con­sume too much of one (even good) thing, it becomes the oppos­ite: you have enough and you don’t want it any­more. They start to be overextended.

This is the list of artists for 2017 in Ger­many booked and/​or planned so far:

Mark Wright
Chris­toph Borer
Dr. Marrax
Bert Rex
Joshua Jay
Fran­cis Tabary
JUNO
Cody Fisher
Braidon Morris

I am abso­lutely sure there will be more to be announced. I am guilty as well, because I will fight (yes!) and try to ring in Paul Gor­don and Mark Els­don. It will be tough. I will have to for­get about my own lec­ture with all this, unfor­tu­nately. Maybe next year then. Or maybe in five years. Or maybe I even stop doing lec­tures at all.

I under­stand the lec­ture busi­ness has become a ‘huge’ mar­ket. I under­stand the magi­cians see the pos­sible profit doing lec­tures. I can under­stand, because I did (do) it myself. But what I don’t under­stand is the ruth­less­ness and thought­less­ness of the clubs and organisers.

Add to these live lec­tures the zil­lions of down­load lec­tures and the lec­tures done by club mem­bers them­selves then you have the total overkill. And you are rais­ing a new breed of ‘zom­bie-power-killer’ lec­tur­ers, who know only one thing: get the lec­tures, make sales and kill any­thing which stands in the way. No mat­ter how good, exper­i­enced they are, nor wheth­er the stuff they show is worth it.

The down­side is that the truly good lec­tur­ers with real world per­form­ing exper­i­ence and worth­while know­ledge are get­ting rarer and rarer. The former lec­ture cir­cuit mutated into a sales mar­ket, which attracts more and more people who are just inter­ested in offer­ing their products inven­ted solely for selling. this, on the long range, will con­trib­ute to dimin­ish the over­all per­form­ance qual­ity of the ama­teurs in magic.

Stop that insan­ity, it is time for a ret­ro­gres­sion and con­vales­cence of this fra­gile but very import­ant aspect of our magic scene. If you con­tin­ue, this mar­ket will die like the brick and mor­tar magic shops. You will cut off fees, pre­vent income and work for pro­fes­sion­al people, who are pre­pared and cap­able of doing this job in an appro­pri­ate way in har­mony with their colleagues..

Some­times that ‘more’ and ‘vari­ety’ is everything else but good.

Pass it on!

I don’t jump on a new one-trick pony too often, but this one really baffled (and fooled) me. Check out the video trail­er, make up your mind and down­load it. It is really good and a fun trick to do.

I am going to incor­por­ate this into a manip­u­la­tion routine for par­lour shows. I con­struc­ted it using a jumbo card and it works like a charm.

I have even found two little improvements:

I can show the card from both sides at the beginning.
I can have the card rest against a glass at the begin­ning (this would be neces­sary in the manip­u­la­tion act and adds to the deception).

If Lloyd is inter­ested and wants to share it with you, there may be an explan­a­tion on his site.

See the trail­er and buy the down­load here.

Pass it on!

There are more book tests in magic than magi­cians are will­ing to buy. The num­ber of dif­fer­ent sys­tems and edi­tions is stag­ger­ing. I have had my fair share: M.O.A.B., Flash­back, Codex‑X, you name it.

All of them are good, but some of them depend on pre­pared books. I know a lot of book tests that can be done any­time, any­where and with bor­rowed books. But I wanted a book test that was dif­fer­ent in terms of the effect it had on the audience.

The fol­low­ing idea is not new, but I don’t care about that. It is a good idea that works well in front of an audi­ence, and that is all that mat­ters to me.

The key is the theme of the present­a­tion. I talk about a “book that has not yet been writ­ten”. I use a sim­il­ar present­a­tion with my ver­sion of the Sven Pad, which I sell to the audi­ence as “Hem­ing­way’s Last Notebook”.

I once bought some beau­ti­ful note­books that I inten­ded to use as my reg­u­lar mas­ter note­book, but they turned out to be too bulky for that pur­pose. Rather than send them back, I kept them and came up with the idea of doing a book test with them. The books look inter­est­ing; they have blank pages with gold edges and look like a bible. The paper is of very good, heavy qual­ity so that writ­ing with a light pen­cil does­n’t cause any bleed­ing, which is a neces­sity for this method.

The basic idea is to show the audi­ence the con­tents of the book by turn­ing the pages. They can see that all the pages are blank. While turn­ing the pages, a spec­tat­or is asked to say “stop” and the book is opened at that page. They are asked to think and remem­ber one of the many ima­gin­ary words. Then you tell them the word they thought of!

I began to think of ways to solve this chal­lenge. I found quite a few and will pub­lish them some time. But for now, here is some food for thought.

The most dir­ect approach would be to con­struct a sort of Magic Col­our­ing Book by cut­ting off every oth­er page, sim­il­ar to a Svengali deck. On the trimmed pages, write a few words in large let­ters, using a light pen­cil – it is best to write them in cap­it­al let­ters so that the spec­tat­or has no dif­fi­culty read­ing them. Bet­ter still, write these words with a light grey, thick felt-tip mark­er (one that does­n’t bleed through).

These words are your power words and you need a sys­tem to fish for the one the spec­tat­or is think­ing of. There are many sys­tems for doing this. One of the simplest would be a branch­ing ana­gram. In this case, you would ‘pick’ the let­ters out of the spec­tat­or’s head and arrive at their chosen word. Atlas Brook­ings had a nice piece of soft­ware called “Pro­gress­ive Ana­gram Gen­er­at­or” and it is very help­ful in con­struct­ing a nice word list.

I nev­er liked the ana­gram meth­od too much in this con­text. The prob­lem is that no mat­ter how ingeni­ous these ana­grams are con­struc­ted, the meth­od could be seen through. Reveal­ing indi­vidu­al let­ters is not such an impress­ive feat; it smacks of look­ing for let­ters in a cross­word puzzle. This is how the meth­od works.

A more subtle way to fish for inform­a­tion is to use words that describe objects or abstract con­cepts. There is a very nat­ur­al divi­sion between some­thing you can touch (a phys­ic­al object) and some­thing you can­not touch (non-phys­ic­al things like emotions).

In my cur­rent list of words, I use the words derived from Heike Schen­kendorf’s book test, but any list is good as long as you can fish for the words eas­ily and in a con­vin­cing, dir­ect way.

The present­a­tion

Get an audi­ence mem­ber to help you on stage. Turn the pages in one dir­ec­tion to show that they are blank, but don’t let the audi­ence see the book. Then have them stop and open the book, mak­ing sure that only they can see the double page. Using the Svengali prin­ciple, she will stop at a page where the writ­ten words are vis­ible. Ask her to think of one of the many words on this page (double real­ity). Go through the ana­gram sequence as usu­al, pick­ing the let­ters out of her head, and divine the ‘thought’ word. Replace the book with an unpre­pared one and leave it on the floor of the stage for someone to pick it up and exam­ine it if she wishes.

Not so long ago the concept of the bul­let Journ­al came to the aware­ness of many people which had used the clas­sic Filo­fax time man­age­ment systems.

It was­n’t long and the thing cre­ated a real hype on the inter­net, a lot of people for­get­ting the major idea behind and mak­ing their journ­als into a scrap­book, glue­ing silly stuff inside. Some made it a book for prac­tising calligraphy.

This is typ­ic­al in these mod­ern times to make a trend (often sale­able) out of an idea and jump onto the train, copy­ing slav­ishly and without think­ing what oth­ers do. The basic ideas behind the bul­let journ­al and why it was inven­ted are often for­got­ten with all the hype, using expens­ive col­oured Japan­ese pens being more import­ant that the con­tent (read an inter­est­ing view on this here).

If you stick to the main concept and use it what it was inten­ded for, it is good. The idea is to stay away from digit­al note tak­ing and go back to the basics with pen and paper. With the bul­let journ­al concept, you can do this without being forced into the alloc­a­tions a Filo­fax has.

Being a paper and pen afi­cion­ado myself, I quickly real­ised the poten­tial of this concept for magic and became an avid fan of it. By incor­por­at­ing this sys­tem into your magic­al note­books, you will not only have a col­lec­tion of your ideas, but also an agenda to keep track of your prac­tising times and achievements.

All you need is a simple note­book and a pen. The thing that makes this sys­tem dif­fer­ent to the Filo­fax is that here you cre­ate your tables and timelines. You can even insert cer­tain spread­sheets which are track­ers, show­ing clearly the monthly results.

The bul­let journ­al will be more or less a note­book with a timeline. Also, using the sys­tem will make sure you remem­ber and put a ‘time stamp’ on when exactly you have a cer­tain idea. Con­sid­er­ing the amount of ideas I gen­er­ate and col­lect each month, this sys­tem really saved my life and made things a lot easi­er for me.

Just think about cre­at­ing a few monthly spread­sheets for prac­tice and achieve­ment of cer­tain sleights, tricks or routines. If you get into the habit of using your note­book on an every­day basis, you will be auto­mat­ic­ally reminded to put in those short time prac­tising ses­sions of your favour­ite techniques.

With this sys­tem you can also sched­ule these train­ing ses­sions and divide them into smal­ler chunks, achiev­ing much more without even noti­cing it. Anoth­er use­ful spread­sheet would be the habit track­er they very often use in this sys­tem. With this, you will be able to change the way you do cer­tain sleights in a very short time.

Give it a try and think about it, it is really worth it. You’ll find all neces­sary basic inform­a­tion here: www​.bul​let​journ​al​.com. On You­Tube, you can find many very nice and refresh­ing ideas on how to main­tain such a per­son­al­ised note­book. Check out the work­ing and the con­struc­tion of the vari­ous track­ers and think how you could apply them to your magic training.

Final Tips

Don’t get over­whelmed by the vast amount of dif­fer­ent tech­niques. Just start with a simple plain note­book and a pen.

Install the basic fea­tures of a bul­let journ­al: index, year, month, week, day, future, trackers.

If you do this the first time, just install one month and work with it for that 30 days. Don’t install the whole year. Things will change on a monthly basis as you get bet­ter with it.

Don’t go for all the hype and expens­ive ‘props’ people want to sell you. The bul­let journ­al idea was a min­im­al­ist­ic idea and should remain so.

Con­cen­trate on the con­tent, not on the form.

Take whatever works for you, and for­get the rest.

Pass it on!