The greatest ebook on dice work ever written for the magician. A complete manual of dice manipulation from the magic angle. Reputation making tricks. A wealth of content, including the Great Dice Stack in which four dice on the table are covered with a dice cup. Performer slides cup in a swinging motion, with its mouth against the table, then lifts it, and the dice are piled in a perfect upright stack! Featured by the famous John Paul, John Platt and many other close up men.
Also includes dice transposition, a dice and hat routine, holdout, They're Loaded, 3 dice and a coin, etc. Complete analysis of Dice Control on soft and hard surfaces. Complete explanation of Soup and Crooked Dice of every kind, including detection and switches. Gambling Demonstration Routine, lecture outline, suggested program, expose, explanation of terms.
When Modern Magic was published in 1876, it included only two tricks with dice, which covered slightly more than two pages of print. In 1904, in his Later Magic, Professor Hoffmann found no dice magic worth recording, except for a few improvements on The Changing Dice, one of the feats he had explained in his great pioneer work. It is probably the growing popularity of "close-up magic" that has caused magicians to expand the field of conjuring with dice. Whatever the reason may be, there has unquestionably been such an expansion, as was indicated by the publication, in 1943, of Edward Marlo's Shoot the Works, a booklet of substantial size.
In the first of three sections, Mr. Marlo explains how to bring dice together, gradually and magically, under a hat; how to assemble them mysteriously inside (and not under) the hat; how to throw dice through a hat, as is often done with coins in The Miser's Dream; and how to make dice pass, one by one, from left to right hand until all are in the latter. Section II tells the reader how to operate a dice-cup so that the dice will arrange themselves in a stack of four, with the topmost die showing a number that has been called out by a spectator; how to scoop the dice up into the cup, one by one, and also cause them to fall out one at a time; how to shake four of a kind out of the dice-cup; and how to "hold out" dice by means of sleight-of-hand and also by using special dice-boxes.
The third section of the book explains a trick with three dice and a coin; The Thumb Twister, a new version of the old feat in which the spots of a die (held between the thumb and forefinger) are made to change several times; methods of "die control," which give the operator an advantage over those with whom he plays; seven types of "crooked dice," and rules for detecting dice of this kind; a half-dozen methods of "switching" dice; and one or two other items. This section also contains a one-page article entitled Advice to Service Men, and a page and a half of suggestions for working up a "gambling demonstration routine" in the form of a lecture.
Some of the effects here described are easy, but others (as the author admits) are pretty difficult. However, the explanations are so fully detailed and illustrated that whatever difficulties there are should not be insurmountable. The text, on the whole, is so well written that we wish it had received the little additional care that would have eliminated several relatively unimportant but annoying errors. For example, a glance at the dictionary would have convinced Mr. Marlo that the singular of "dice'; is always "die," and not both "die" and "dice," as one might gather from noting the fine impartiality with which this author uses both words to express the singular. This sort of error (which, in the present booklet, is repeated many times) could and should be corrected while a book is still in manuscript form.
Shoot the Works is a 48-page booklet, well reproduced from typewritten script by offset printing, and bound in soft boards. The 38 drawings by Gordon M. Howatt are exceptionally good. If we wished to present tricks with dice, we should certainly turn to Shoot the Works as our chief source of information on the subject.
