Best of Magazines
by Chris Wasshuber

Anybody who has done a good amount of reading in magic literature will have noticed that some of the biggest gems are hidden in magic magazines and journals. There is a good reason for that. Books typically focus on a narrow topic and are usually written by one author. The title of the book often tells us what we expect to find inside the book. In other words, the title and author already exposes to some degree what is inside the book. The result of this is that books tend to be much more thoroughly explored and known. For these reasons it is therefore much harder to hide something in a book. However, with magazines and journals we generally do not have that information available. Most magazines collect contributions from a wide list of authors on a wide list of subjects. It is therefore impossible to locate items of interest by merely looking at a journal title. Only the recent appearance of digital versions of magazines has improved this situation. One can now search through entire runs and collections of magic magazines to find articles on a particular subject. But even with the availability of full text search engines, like Lybrary.com’s Magic Knowledge Base, it takes time to locate interesting items. Sometimes it is not possible to find a selective search term which filters out the wheat from the chaff.

This ebook uses an entirely different approach to find those hidden gems. This ebook collects the very best suggestions from a group of well-read magicians. I have asked my colleagues to give me their three all-time favorite articles from magic magazines. Which articles did they still vividly remember after many years? Which tricks from magazines went straight into their working repertoire? Which articles have changed their way of thinking? Which articles have influenced them and made them better magicians?