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What are the best magic books for beginners?
This is actually a very hard question to answer because there are all kinds of beginners with all kinds of backgrounds and interests. I will limit myself to the performance of close-up where I gathered my own experience doing magic, and there I will focus on magic with cards, coins, and mentalism. If you want to take a shortcut and not read through the rest of my opinion here are the three best classics which are wonderful and affordable:
- The Royal Road to Card Magic by Jean Hugard and Fred Braue
- The Modern Coin Magic by J.B. Bobo
- Practical Mental Effects by Ted Annemann
CARD MAGIC
If I would…
The Thirty-Nine Steps to Mentalism
This is an excerpt from Bob Cassidy's exceptional Fundamentals ebook. Many consider this ebook the best Bob has ever written. It lists Bob's 39 most important magic books to study to achieve mastery in mentalism. The unique feature of this list is that Bob explains for each title why it is in his list. So here we go ...The Thirty-Nine Steps - A Mentalist's Library of Essential Works
Recent Thread on an Internet Magicians’ Forum –Question: “What book or books are essential reading for someone just starting out in magic, particularly mentalism?”First Answer: “Annemann's…
The CIA Magician: John Mulholland
It is a misnomer to call John Mulholland (1898 - 1970) a “spy” or “operative.” He was neither for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from 1953 to 1958. He was a pedantic scholar who did field research and wrote reports. Largely criticized by people who seek to take down his reputation as “The World’s Master Magician” (a title he shared with Thurston). Mulholland was a tall, gangly man with wide ears, a distinct sense of offbeat humor and was married to his wife Pauline for forty years, and was also involved with his secretary Dorothy Wolf longer than the relationship he had with his wife. His wife Pauline accepted this as a condition of their marriage, saying after his death, “Johnny was so much man that he could not be served by one woman—his Renaissance spirit so great.” Mulholland took over the editorship of magic’s MOST esteemed magazine, The Sphinx and…
Edward Gallaway is S. W. Erdnase
To read the full story, the full case of why Edward Gallaway is Erdnase, get my book The Cardsharp and his Book.I know this will come as a shock to some, particularly those who hold on to the old rumor that it was an Andrews. However, this rumor cannot be substantiated. We have to trace this rumor back from Vernon to Sprong to a Drake son who would have to get it from his father who we don't even know had any direct contact with Erdnase. Yet some believe this like it is an irrefutable fact. It isn't. It simply is a hypothesis and a not particularly good one. If the name Andrews played…
Magic Knowledge Base - Help
Anybody who has a Lybrary.com customer account and subscribes to our free magic newsletter has access to our Magic Knowledge Base, a full-text search engine indexing thousands of magic books, magazines, instruction sheets, and other paper ephemera. If you are trying to locate an elusive description of an effect or move, if you are researching magic's history, or if you want to check out an ebook before purchasing, the Magic Knowledge Base will come in handy. It offers features we have not seen in other search engines.You can access the Magic Knowledge Base from three locations: from…
Why Lybrary.com? Why Ebooks?
It’s been several years now since Chris Wasshuber and his venture, Lybrary.com, became a part of the landscape of the magic community. To be perfectly frank (and Chris can confirm this), when he and I first started having discussions about ebooks on the various magic message boards I wasn’t just against the concept, I was vehemently against the concept. Not that our arguments were mean spirited (though Chris had - and in fact still has - to put up with some mean spirited comments): they were just spirited. We both argued passionately for our respective sides.However, I argued as if Chris and his venture were a direct attack on…
Ted Annemann's Five-Foot Shelf of Magic
Ted Annemann wrote in the Jinx No.8 (May 1935) on page 32:
Down through the years have come many books on the art of magic and allied subjects. Of late the production of such literature has increased until hardly a week goes by without the appearance of a book, brochure, or manuscript. Many are good and many are not. The titles given here is an impartial and unbiased opinion of my own as to what books constitute a working library on the art of mystifying.
Every included work has its value and I take my stand now that the shelf of magic as herein listed covers every phase and known…
Card Illustrator Tool
Let us imagine you are writing a book about conjuring and are in need of illustrations of cards. For example, you want to show a setup or stack in the form of a card ribbon. Perhaps some cards are face-up, some are face-down. Or perhaps you want to show a fan of cards with some cards protruding from the fan. You could take photos but nicely done illustrations do look better. What do you do if you are not an illustrator and can't afford to hire one? I have the solution for you, and it is free of charge.All of these illustrations and much more can now be created very easily and professionally…
Magic Square Effects
I have been interested in magic squares longer than I have been interested in magic. And I have been interested in magic for a long time. It was actually a close cousin of the magic square, the magic matrix as described by Martin Gardner in one of his mathemagic books, which got me into magic. But that is a story for another day.
In this article I want to explain two simple ways to construct an arbitrary 4x4 magic square.
The easiest…
A Little Known Tool to Identify an Online Pirate or Copyright Infringer
If you have dealt with online piracy and copyright infringement for any amount of time, you will know that it is often very difficult to identify the person who is the infringer. By identifying I mean finding out their real name and address to be able to hold them accountable for the damage they caused. One of the reasons for this difficulty is data privacy laws that prevent companies from sharing the account information of infringers.For example, let us assume you wrote a book and you find that somebody is selling without your permission a digital version of it, an ebook, on Amazon.…
Jason England's 17 Card Books to Study
In September 2010 Theory 11 released a short video clip where Jason England introduced 17 books on card magic any serious card magician should read. It was titled "An instructional download on the things you can't download" (my emphasis). Well, I respect the talented guys at Theory 11, but they are a bit behind the curve when it comes to downloads because even back in 2010, 10 of the 17 books were available as download ebooks from Lybrary.com - and most of them for many years. Several more became available in the following years.I can second Jason England's selection. These are all…
miniTesla: A new and better way to prototype and build electronics
I became interested in electronics in my early teens. At 14 years of age, I made my first big career decision and decided to enter a technical high school to study electronics. This type of school is unique to Austria, a so-called HTL (Higher Technical Learning Institute), where one has school the entire day, including Saturday, and one does not graduate after 4 years as in a regular high school, but only after 5 years. The advantage of that school type is that one graduates with an engineering degree. It was the hardest school I went to, but also the one I learned most including a lot…Lybrary.com is the world's largest ebook retailer and publisher in magic (magic tricks, sleight-of-hand, mentalism, illusions...), gambling (poker, blackjack...), and games (bridge, chess...). We can offer exclusive contents you will not find anywhere else. Our ebooks and instructional videos will make you a more skilled magician, a better poker player, a more powerful chess and bridge opponent, or simply entertain and inform you.