The Master Code
Overall customer rating: ★★★★★reviewed by Jeffrey Whiting (confirmed purchase)
Rating: ★★★★★ (Date Added: Wednesday 16 April, 2025)
Robert Nelson was one of the most prolific, and knowledgeable, writers in the field of Mentalism.
As an aficionado of two person telepathy acts, I bought this book to add to my collection.
Nelson has produced a carefully graduated course for anyone wishing to learn this specialist act, and brings the benefit of experience to the course as well.
There are certain parts of the code that may appear quite “stiff” to modern audiences. Times change, and the detailed footnotes in the text reflect this and offer the reader additional information or resources to personalise and modernise their act!
I especially liked the section on coding questions to the medium; Nelson has drawn on the pioneering works of C A Conlin to give you a list of 99 most common questions, and useful subdivisions for further elucidation.
Even if you never perform a Q&A act this way, the list of probabilities will help your Cold Reading!
Despite its generous 150+ page length, and encyclopaedic tone, Nelson’s book does not cover certain “positional” codes or silent ones. However there’s more than enough information here to create your own.
I’d throughly recommend the book for both the collector/archivist and the serious mentalist.