Old but Gold

This top­ic has been around for dec­ades and many times you will hear that expres­sion ‘old but gold’. Most of the times there is the recom­mend­a­tion to ‘just dig into the old lit­er­at­ure’, because it is there where you will find the hid­den treasures.

That may well be right, but the prob­lem is where exactly start to ‘dig’. There are thou­sands of thou­sands of books, magazines and book­lets to choose from. So, where to start?

I will now explain the way I tackled this prob­lem. Keep in mind that these are only my per­son­al thoughts and it is my way to go, based on the exper­i­ences I had. They might be use­ful for oth­er per­sons as well.

Truth is, that you will end up search­ing and search­ing, find­ing not too much really worth your time and energy, because you will get lost and bur­ied under­neath the amount of mater­i­al you find. Most of the time the ‘research’ is noth­ing more than an inter­est­ing (but time con­sum­ing) read. The point is that you have to know exactly where to look and which authors are interesting.

Luck­ily, in these times we have such great help from our com­puters. Every­one with a comp has an invalu­able tools at his hands and can build up a per­son­al lib­rary or archive. The most import­ant point is to have or build a sys­tem that makes sure you find what you want.

The major­ity of the rel­ev­ant lit­er­at­ure these days is avail­able in PDF format which are indexed. You can eas­ily search for a cer­tain top­ic and the comp will bring up all the cor­res­pond­ing PDFs, if you have the right soft­ware to do this. The advant­age of the elec­tron­ic books and magazines is the fact that you don’t have to store the huge amount of phys­ic­al books in your home. In the case of the magazines and peri­od­ic­als this can be massive.

In my case, I built my archive around the soft­ware DEVON­think, which is avail­able for almost all plat­forms. I am aware that the pro ver­sion (in which an OCR mod­ule is incor­por­ated) is not that cheap, but on the long haul it pays back. Once you start work­ing with that soft­ware and put­ting in one PDF after the oth­er, you will be amazed how effi­cient and quick your researches will be. Adding new books to it is a breeze and the index­ing is done automatically.

Now for the sources. In order to com­pile a per­son­al work­ing lib­rary, you’ll have to some­where get the PDFs. Luck­ily, there are per­sons who have done that work for years already. There are people like Denis Behr that have built a com­pre­hens­ive data­base for search­ing for many years. Or there are people like Chriss Wasshuber, whose www​.lybrary​.com has estab­lished itself as one of the num­ber one places to go, if you search ebooks and PDFs on magic. Wasshuber­’s col­lec­tion is vast and will make you happy for many years. So I sug­gest you start there.

How to know what to search for
The main prob­lem is to know where to start and what to search for. Many times people ask me for a sort of ‘list’ with all the sources where the good­ies are hid­den. The prob­lem is, that this list would be enorm­ous and would­n’t make too much sense. Many dream of hav­ing such a list, going through the books and magazines men­tioned there and then have the holy grail. Besides, that task would take years.

The reas­on for this demand is usu­ally that the magi­cian is only seek­ing for some­thing ‘new’ (even if this means it is actu­ally old, but unknown to the oth­ers). He wants some stuff to show to the oth­ers that appears to be ‘new’ and fresh. But that is not the right approach. It is like going onto the ocean for fish­ing, but not know­ing which fish one wants and where. It is end­less and on the long run frus­trat­ing, lead­ing to more or less nothing.

The more effi­cient way is to focus on your cur­rent magic­al prob­lem. You will have to know exactly what you want and what your prob­lem is. Focus­sing is para­mount. If you don’t, you will get lost in the ocean of inform­a­tion avail­able (and it is an abyss). If you take a magazine like Genii, which spans over forty years, then you can ima­gine the amount of inform­a­tion that is con­tained in there. But there is no com­puter soft­ware that is able to pick the ‘gold dust’ out for you. You will have to do it your­self. That is the reas­on why you should have a plan of what to look for.

The thing I real­ised over the years is that the amount of ‘addi­tion­al’ inform­a­tion, that is pro­duced in research­ing a cer­tain top­ic is vast. If you search out for ‘col­or chan­ging silk’, for example, you will be sur­prised of how much addi­tion­al stuff is emer­ging! Stuff you did­n’t think of when you star­ted your ini­tial search. To keep track of that addi­tion­al stuff alone is a monu­ment­al task.

The secret in build­ing such a lib­rary is to keep it small and humble in the begin­ning and (maybe more import­ant) to early start spe­cial­ising. It makes no sense to dive into illu­sion plan sys­tems and stage illu­sions, when your primary interest is in the new­est vari­ation of the ‘mat­rix’ effect. So focus on the range of magic that is import­ant to you. From there on, start to add stuff.

Here now a few ‘begin­ner­’s recom­mend­a­tions’. This little list is by no means com­plete or pre­tends to be, but it is a worth­while start­ing point for someone who quickly and effi­ciently wants to build a sol­id per­son­al lib­rary. I per­son­ally would sug­gest you start right out with the magazines. The reas­on is that mostly in the magazines there are reviews and recom­mend­a­tions of good books and hints for where some nug­gets are hid­den. So, by read­ing care­fully through the good magazines, you will get a lot of inform­a­tion on the books, too. Anoth­er point is that so many tricks, which are repub­lished in a book, at first appeared in a magazine. Many times it is simply not neces­sary to have the book, because much of it’s con­tent was pub­lished already in the mags.

A selec­tion of magazines for the start
GENII
The Link­ing Ring
M.U.M.
ABRACADABRA
MAGIC magazine
MAGIGRAM
CLUB 71
PABULAR
OPUS
SPELLBINDER
Pall­bear­er­’s Review
EPILOGUE
THE GEN
Chap’s Scrapbook
Cen­ter tear
JINX
SPHINX
KABBALA
Magic Circular
Hugard’s Magic Monthly
APOCALYPSE
Richard’s Almanac
Magic­al Arts Journal
Arcane
Pentagram
New Pentagram
Stanyon’s Magic
The New Phoenix
The Tops
MAGICK

As you can see, this little selec­tion alone is a massive amount of work! But when you take the time to index all this, you will have a VERY good start­ing point for your archive. If everything is text-index­ing ready, the search will be quick and effi­cient. You will be sur­prised how ‘cre­at­ive’ you are and what amaz­ing mater­i­al is wait­ing for you.