Cards in Cabaret
by Ken de Courcy

The thing which annoys me about Ken de Courcy is that he has a tidy mind. This means he correlates everything in his nut so that it all has a place. This I don't have. So I suppose my annoyance is goaded by envy.

Now if you were to ask me to give you a hundred commercial card tricks which were new to audiences, I'd swallow down the Six Card Repeat and the Brainwave Deck and die quietly.

Not so our gallant Ken de C. He just sits down and puts a gaggle of highly commercial card tricks into book form ... and readably so, too. And, blast me thumb-tips, he invents and improves on many existing tricks. The main part of the whole deal is that everyone herein is to show on a platform. None of the finger-breaking under-your-nose stuff which we already have enough of anyhow.

This book makes magical history by establishing two distinct precedents. First, there has long been a need for a work on the subject of entertaining card magic suitable for presentation to the larger audience; this is the first major work to recognise that need and fulfill it.

The accent is on entertainment and, for tricks to entertain, they must be capable of being seen. These are all visible from quite a distance ... but the exact distance is up to you. The late Al Koran could perform the Torn and Restored Cigarette Paper and the Linking Finger Rings in the largest theatre and still knock them cold. Billy McComb worked the Coin in the Bottle on the stage of the London Palladium. It's all in how you sell it.

The contents are not theoretical, they've been designed for the performer. There are no joint-twisting sleights, but it's been assumed you have the rudiments and can handle a pack without showering the audience with cards. What sleight-of-hand there is can be termed elementary, the kind that should have been included in any magical apprenticeship.

The most important requirement is to be able to handle a member of the audience in such a way that, regardless of what happens, they're glad they came up to help.