This "Scrapbook" is a small, haphazard collection of some of my contributions to the Art of Magic, over the past 50 years. Since the late 1960's I have contributed hundreds of my ideas to over a dozen national and international magic magazines, run a magician's service producing over 2000 magic items, (some hundreds of which were my own creations and which sold over a million Dollars worth a year around the world at one time), and for which I wrote over 2000 "instruction sheets." Many of these instructions had "ideas" for the use of the props that enabled our customers to get the maximum mileage from their investment.
I have also edited and published a few magic magazines, of which the Swami and Mantra are internationally known, but there were the JS Magic Circle Bulletin (my first) and the EF Magic Update which was a catalog-cum-magizette distributed to some 1800+ magicians in India. Unfortunately, I have no records, or even copies of everything I created, wrote or published.
In my initial years in the late 1960s and 1970s there were no PCs, Word Processors, or digital storage systems available. Articles for magazines were typed on a typewriter, with a carbon copy for the record. These "copies" physically deteriorated over a couple of decades into brittle fragments. Instructions for commercially marketed items were typed on a "mimeographing" master, and run off on a duplicating mimeograph machine. I had published my ideas in several of the most popular magic magazines of the period, like Supreme's Magigram, Peter Warlocks's New Pentagram, Goodliffe's Abra, Harry Stanley's Gen, William Larsen's Genii, Bascom Jone's Magick, Tony Raven's Invocation etc. besides some local magazines like S.D. Mukherjee's Magic Net, P.C. Sorcar's AIMC Bulletin, and many others who requested an article for their souvenir or magazine.
For some years I had hard copies of complete runs of the many magic magazines I subscribed to, and in which this material was published. But the sheer volumes became unmanageable, with my collection of magic books getting preference to the 100s of accumulated periodicals, and rather than have them decay in packed boxes, I gave them away. I had no access to this material, till a few years ago, when e-Books and PDF copies of this material became available, mostly through Chris Wasshuber's Lybrary.com.
Many of these contributions were my creations which I had made and used for my performances as a "Cabaret performer" in those days. In reading these over (many of them "new" to me, as I had completely forgotten most of what I had written in those years), I realised there were some good ideas there worth preserving and passing on, not just based on my biased opinion, but the comments of some of the readers and reviewers. And the idea of these "Scrapbooks" was born. This was to collect some of the articles and commercial instruction sheets in a collection that I felt were worth collating and passing on. I plan to produce more than one of these Scrapbooks, as the material is much too diverse and voluminous for just one book.
This first "Scrapbook" contains a selection of items the average handyman can make, (in addition to items that require little or no preparation, like cards and paper and pencil.)
- Introduction
- Auto Triumph
- Crystal Thought Condenser
- The Magic Zoo
- The Phantom Flush
- Phantom Phlush Mk-II
- Evaw Niarb
- The Brainwave Bandwagon
- From Aunt Teresa with Love
- The 543rd T & R Note
- Ready - Set - Go
- Forcing Pocket Calculator
- Mind-Kaleido
- Magic Conventions
- Compass Clock
- Blank Blank
- Auto Suggestion & Incensed
- 20th Century Alchemy
- The Plot
- 3 Way R&S Force Deck
- Treble Tote
- Wild Ideas
- Additional Ideas For Your Change Wallet
- Etiquette for Magicians
- The Parity Principle
- The Ultimate Telephone Trick
- Great Men
- Simplex Book Test
- Almost Perfect Book Test
- From Satan with Love
- Super Suit
- Supreme Showcase
- Why does he do it?
1st edition 2023, PDF 97 pages.
word count: 53936 which is equivalent to 215 standard pages of text
