Over 50 years, I have run a Magician's service, producing and supplying several hundreds of thousands of pieces of over 2500 varieties of props to magic dealers and magicians worldwide, with retail sale value exceeding a million dollars a year over several years, so I figure we have been doing something right!
Many were "classic props" - my favorite sources being books like Hoffman's Modern, More and Later Magic, the many excellent magical secrets series and other illusion books by Will Goldston, and of more modern times, the World of Magic trilogy by Jack Hughes - with an effort to some times modify the props and their use to present day performing requirements.
But I also made and marketed a few hundred "originals" that I created or adapted. When I started in magic, most magicians were expected to have some handicraft abilities, as a lot of the literature available on the subject required the ability to construct the props detailed. And nothing gave me greater satisfaction than fiddling around with odds and ends to create a new gizmo for my act, or later for sale through our magician's service. These ideas, (some minuscule, and some major) have provided a decent living for me and more than 300 craftsmen over several decades.
Unfortunately, skilled craftsmen are a vanishing species, with future generations preferring the security of a desk IT job, to the skills, and manual labor involved in making magic props. We can no longer make half the items we used to make because there are no people with the skills or patience to make them.
It is my desire that these ideas do not fade into oblivion, even if many of them are no longer viable in the present environment. While skilled craftsmen to make magic props are almost extinct, many products of other use originally made by skilled craftsmen are now being re-created by CAD and 3-D printers that may become as common and affordable as inkjet printers are today, and maybe some of these ideas will spark some innovative mind to produce another good prop or magic effect.
Not all the items require special tools or capabilities - there are several I made models of with a common tool-bag, before making the dies and jigs required for the volumes of commercial sales. This book details many of these ideas, it is an attempt to "leave my humble footprints in the sands of time!"
We provided quite comprehensive instruction sheets with the items we supplied, and much of this book has the original instructions to describe and illustrate the props, and their use.
- Introduction
- Rainbow Chips
- Magician at the Casino
- Super Psychic Chips
- Climax Vision
- Multicolour Matrix
- Fire And Ice
- Space Warp
- Future Fungus
- Chameleon Fungus
- Visual Colour Changing Plumes
- Slow Change Plumes
- Famous Stamp Album Trick
- Six Way Coloring Book
- How to win at Dice games
- Improved Mental Logs
- Costume Capers
- The Alphabet Deck
- Card-I-Mental
- ESP Mental
- Entanglement
- The King of Magic
- Hot Flip Flops
- Performing Pachyderm
- Howzzat the Clown
- Backstage Vanishing Elephant
- The Clown who lost his Head
- Cinderella goes to School
- Hexed Ring Box
- Telling Times
- Panel Escape
- Spook Light
- Dream Time
- Command Light
- The Devon Drum
- Sam's Super Ropes
- One for the Road
- 18+(A Collection Of Card Cocktails)
- The Gypsy Picture Frame
- Stop Smokin
1st edition 2023, PDF 92 pages.
word count: 57734 which is equivalent to 230 standard pages of text
