Some regard this book as the bible of coin magic. And it is indeed packed with moves and tricks. To be precise, there are 116 coin sleights and 236 coin tricks. If you consider adding a coin trick to your program look no further. This is the book for you. Any other book about coins references this one.
This is a book to delight the hearts of amateur magicians which means, of course, most members of the magic fraternity - because nearly all of the performing done by amateurs is, almost inevitably, close-up, impromptu magic; and coin conjuring lends itself particularly well to that type of entertaining. Indeed, except for The Miser's Dream, there are scarcely any coin tricks of sufficient magnitude to qualify as really effective stage magic, suitable for audiences of considerable size. But, as Mr. Bobo's book amply demonstrates, there are scores of baffling coin tricks now available for drawing-room performance.
It was not always thus! Early in the century, there were no "coin treatises" as such with the single exception of Downs's Modern Coin Manipulation, which had little to offer the amateur (or the professional either, for that matter) but the "continuous front and back-hand palm," a vastly over-rated sleight of very little practical usefulness to most of the magicians who slaved to master it. From Downs to Bobo, we recall only one publication dealing with coin conjuring alone - Jean Hugard's Coin Magic, an 88-page, illustrated booklet which was published by Max Holden. However, there has been a fairly extensive treatment of coin sleights and tricks in such works as Downs's The Art of Magic (pp. 227-271), Gaultier's Magic Without Apparatus (pp. 244-358), Hilliard's Greater Magic (pp. 665-720), Buckley's Principles and Deceptions (pp. 45-136), and several volumes of The Tarbell Course. The coin sections of these famous books are not superseded, but merely supplemented, by Mr. Bobo's Magnum opus, for they contain a good deal of material that is either not treated at all in Modern Coin Magic, or from lack of space is dealt with somewhat sketchily. The author has brought together much that is old and much that is new in coin conjuring; and it seems to us that his chief contribution to the literature of magic lies in his accumulation and effective presentation of recent developments in sleights, tricks, and routines rather than in the comprehensiveness of his undertaking, impressive as that unquestionably is. Certainly there is enough first-class material here to keep an industrious coin specialist busy throughout a long lifetime - so much, so good, and so varied in nature that the book seems destined to head, for a long time to come, the list of works in this branch of legerdemain.
Physically, Modern Coin Magic is a thing of beauty. It is a professionally-made book of 384 large pages, double column, set in clear type of good size, illustrated with 510 drawings, and handsomely bound in ivory buckram with a gold-and-scarlet title on the spine. To author J .B. Bobo, editor John Braun, and illustrator Nelson C. Hahne, and to the indispensable man in bookmaking, the publisher - in the present instance, Carl Waring Jones - are due the thanks of all to whom the production of a genuinely fine volume on magic is an event of major importance.
