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• The Thirty-Nine Steps to Mentalism
• Cy Endfield's Chess Set
• Ebook Reading Devices:
  Sony Reader, Kindle, Nook, Que, iPad, iLiad, ...
• Largest Origami?
• Non-Evaporative Cheap Portable Air Conditioning
• Business Card Strategies
• The Many Uses of The Shuber Plates
• The Games I Play
• The Learned Pig Project: TLPP
• Erdnase/Gallaway Cover Comparison
• Looking for Books with Edward Gallaway Bookplate
• Magic Map
• Anverdi-type Haunted Card Box
• Folding Slingshot
• Triple Gozinta Boxes

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

Question: “What book or books are essential reading for someone just starting...

Cy Endfield's Chess Set

Cy Endfield was a film director, magician and inventor. Among his many achievements he created a unique chess set which he patented in 1974 in the US (3,806,128). This chess set, which allows one to interlock all back row pieces into a tube for easy storage, was the official FIDE commemorative chess set for the legendary 1972 chess battle between the American chess genius Bobby Fischer and the Russian protege Boris Spassky.

The set was originally made from silver and gilded silver in a limited...

Ebook Reading Devices:
Sony Reader, Kindle, Nook, Que, iPad, iLiad, ...

Which Ebook Reader Should It Be?

Executive Summary

• Best Purchase: SonyReader PRS-600 If you can't wait any longer and want an ebook reader get the SonyReader PRS-600.
• Best Purchase for Academic Article Reading: Kindle DX Although I don't like the Kindle because it locks you into buying ebooks from Amazon, if you mainly buy it to read academic articles, then the Kindle DX is a fair choice. Academic articles typically come as unsecured...

Largest Origami?

On October 19th 1994 I created a giant origami model using a square sheet of paper measuring 6.36 meters on each side. Total weight was 5.45 kg. I made the fold inside the largest paper factory in Austria, Leykam Muerzthaler. I used the entire width of the paper the factory manufactured. Just to cut off a perfectly square piece of such a large piece of paper was a challenge.

This happened during my time in Japan. I was exposed to the art of origami and when I returned home for break I wanted...

Non-Evaporative Cheap Portable Air Conditioning

I decided to combine some of the ideas I found online how to make a cheap non-evaporative air-conditioner. The basic idea is to blow air through ice or cold water to cool it down. The simplest solution is to fill a cooler with ice and have a fan blow air into the cooler and out from another opening comes cooler air. But that simple solution does not provide a lot of air/ice surface for heat exchange. Particularly once the ice starts melting the pool of water reduces the exchange surface and thus...

Business Card Strategies

Over the years I had a couple of pretty lame business cards. You know the kind that your employer issues to you or the ones you print out yourself after an hour of fiddling around with a graphics software. During the last years I did not have a business card. While I am not great at handing out my business card, I do get occasionally asked if I have one, and then I am embarrassed that I don't have one. The most recent such incidence prompted me to get a business card made. But I did not want to...

The Many Uses of The Shuber Plates

The Shuber Plates are a flexible accessory to protect your playing cards. Two stainless steal plates together with a special rubber band secure your cards regardless of if you want to protect one card or more than a regular deck of cards.

You can not only protect your cards, but you can also use the Shuber Plates to build a pocket card press. Take two large paper clips of the kind shown below.

Clip one on each short end of the deck enclosed in the Shuber Plates. Then remove the wire handles from...

The Games I Play

I have been using computers from the earliest days of home computers or personal computers, you know the days of the Sinclair ZX81, or the Commodore VC20, Apple IIe, etc. Actually my first real computer was an Apple IIe. Before that I programmed TI and HP calculators. Afterwards I had PCs and then Macs and PCs, and now a couple of decades later my house is filled literally with dozens of computing devices from the latest tablets, to old laptops, etc.

Why did we all want to have a computer?...

The Learned Pig Project: TLPP

The Learned Pig Project was started in September 1999 by Marko from Panama. Marko's idea was essentially to mimic the Project Gutenberg for magicians. Project Gutenberg's purpose is to digitize public domain books. The Learned Pig Project's goal is to digitize public domain magic books. When Marko started he had four books digitized: My Magic Life (Devant), Miracle Mongers (Houdini), The Lives of the Conjurers (Frost) and Behind the Scenes with the Mediums (Abbott). He would later add dozens more. In...

Erdnase/Gallaway Cover Comparison

I am firmly convinced that Edward Gallaway is S. W. Erdnase. One of many reasons are the surprising similarities between the books Gallaway published later in his life and The Expert at the Card Table. Dr. John Olsson prepared a detailed forensic linguistic analysis comparing Erdnase with Gallaway concluding a strong possibility that Gallaway is Erdnase. Beyond the linguistic match there are several other aspects that are matching, too.

• Erdnase and Gallaway self-published their books.
• Both had their copyrights registered...

Looking for Books with Edward Gallaway Bookplate

I am trying to assemble a list of books which have the Edward Gallaway bookplate, shown below, in them.

If you have any information on books with this bookplate please email me at wasshuber@lybrary.com. The books we have found so far are:

1. The Expert at the Card Table by S. W. Erdnase (1902)
2. The History of the Works of the Learned (1700)
3. The History of the Works of the Learned (1705)

• magic
• gambling
• astronomy ...

Magic Map

I am sure many of you traveled to unfamiliar locations asking: "Where can I find here some magic shops, venues, and other magic sites of interest?" My answer to that question is the Magic Locator service. This is a custom Google map. Type an address into the search box and you will see a map where points of interests for magicians are marked. These are:

• Magic Shops
• Shows
• Lectures
• Conventions
• Historic Sites
• Magic Attractions (this is the catch all category if no other category is better) ...

Anverdi-type Haunted Card Box

In the mid 90s I played around with incorporating electronics into magic. Anverdi had a great idea where a box would close just before a spectator selected card could be placed inside it. I didn't like the mechanics of his box, which was a box for two decks where one half was used for the electronics and the other half for the actual action. The sliding lid of the box would slowly close. Here is a video for the original Anverdi box:

After I read Anverdi's book I could build the variation...

Folding Slingshot

As a boy I made many slingshots ever since my father showed me how. Find a y-branching twig, cut it to size, attach rubber bands, and a piece of leather to hold your projectile. I must have made dozens of them. I loved the compactness of a slingshot. I also liked to make bows and arrows but those were not weapons you could put in your pocket. And they were harder to make for a boy. Finding straight arrows was one of the problems. With a slingshot any pebble, cone, or other smallish piece of something...

Triple Gozinta Boxes

Go figure this one out. Three boxes, big, medium, small, stacked inside each other. So far so good. But hey, what is this? The small box is now large enough to hold the medium and big boxes?

This is my rendition of Lubor Fiedler's ingenious Gozinta Boxes (also known as Parabox or Inside-Out box). (The reason I am touching the boxes so gingerly is that they are 20 years old made from now brittle cardboard. Nevertheless, this effect is one of my favorite illusions.)

For those who know...