This fantastic classic of card magic is considered by many to be as important as his famous Andrus Card Control. This new digital edition has dozens of Andrus sleights, flourishes and routines, all illustrated by 370 drawings by the author. Jerry's work with the diagonal jog is priceless!
This book will inevitably be compared with the great card treatise of a little more than a half-century ago, The Expert at the Card Table, by S. W. Erdnase. Like its predecessor, it is obviously the work of an expert; like the earlier book, it is primarily about card techniques rather than card tricks; and finally, again like the Erdnase book, it breaks new ground and makes available to card conjurers new, and in some cases at least, better ways to reach desired goals than have heretofore been generally known.
Among the 53 sleights and flourishes explained by Mr. Andrus are 9 card "changes," used to switch a single card or packet of cards for another single card or packet; 5 "reverses," which enable the performer to turn over secretly one or more cards in the deck; 6 "diagonal jogs," for secretly getting control of selected cards that have been replaced in the pack; 4 "palms," which make it possible to get secret possession of, and to palm, one or more cards; 12 "miscellaneous sleights," consisting of such things as "double lifts," "jogs," "shuffles," and one-hand "cuts"; and 17 "flourishes or ornamental sleights" of great variety.
We have not yet had time to test these sleights and flourishes with a proper degree of thoroughness, but can report with assurance that there is much material here of a high order, some of which we should certainly consider substituting for sleights that we currently use, if card magic played an important part in our program. For anyone who in 1957 is taking up card conjuring seriously, it would be a grave mistake not to examine with great care the ideas advanced by Mr. Andrus.
The final section of this work, entitled "Routines and Miscellaneous Effects," consists of 65 pages of text which explain 20 card tricks and routines. This part of the Andrus book does not, we feel, provide serious competition for a similar section in the Erdnase book - a section we have always regarded as extraordinarily good, and one that is insufficiently studied. Certainly, the Andrus tricks strike this reviewer as much less sensational, and likely to prove much less useful, than the new techniques he has devised. It will be interesting to see whether Andrus Deals You In gives to card conjuring in the second half of the 20th Century anything like the impetus which The Expert at the Card Table provided in the first half.
The book has 191 pages of text, well printed by the offset process from neatly-typed manuscript, and illustrated with 370 clear line drawings by the author himself. It seems a great pity that so valuable a book has been bound in a way that makes it very hard work indeed to follow the text with cards in hand, as the reader must do if he is to use these explanations to greatest advantage. For a few more cents a copy the "signatures" (or sections) could have been properly sewn, and the book would have opened flat and remained open while in use. Such penny-pinching by a publisher who is making a book that is to sell for as much as five dollars is quite inexcusable, and calls for strong protest from every purchaser for whom the usefulness of the book has thus been greatly reduced.
