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Spirited Pasteboards
by Leo Boudreau

$29

(1 review, 12 customer ratings) ★★★★★

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Spirited Pasteboards by Leo Boudreau
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Max Maven writes in the introduction to Spirited Pasteboards:

There is an ancient Chinese curse which goes, "May you live in interesting times." Bearing this in mind, it is not without some playful malice that I inform you that you are now holding a tome which is extremely interesting.

As with the author's previous book, Psimatrika, the work in this text is primarily based upon stacking arrangements which generate information via binary codes. The principle is by no means new, but in its seventy-year history as a conjuring method it has remained little-known and woefully under-explored.

Mr. Boudreau clearly wishes to remedy that, with a vengeance.

The material in this volume is almost exclusively done with playing cards. However, don't be misled into thinking that this is simply another book of card tricks. Rather, in this book playing cards are used as a frame-of-reference for the author's adventurous speculations. Once the methodological foundations are understood, a far wider range of applications will present themselves. (For that matter, purely as card tricks there are some hot items to be found here.)

At first, much of this material may strike the reader as being infuriatingly complex and confusing. I would urge perseverance; the rewards are well worth the effort. After absorbing the ideas in this book, you may never look at a pack of cards in quite the same way again.

Many of the effects Leo describes are based on what mathematicians call a 'De Bruijn cycle' and coding specialists call a 'Gray code' or 'bracelet code'. It has unique properties which are very useful for the mentalist.

first edition, 1987, Arlington, VA; 234 pages.

  1. Mountain Valley Stack
  2. Calling Cards
  3. All Decked Out
  4. A Hi-Tech Princess
  5. Ultrasense
  6. Stellar Connections
  7. Back Track
  8. White Noise
  9. Bracelet Redux
  10. A Sense of Value
  11. Second Impression
  12. Sudden Impact
  13. Extempore
  14. Suiting Up
  15. Karmatrix
  16. Heady Stuff
  17. Take Three
  18. Estimation & Noise
  19. The Multicard Locator
  20. Any Card at any Number
  21. The Calibrated Deck
  22. The Cutting Edge
  23. No Facial Stack
  24. A Threesome
  25. Cutting The Suits
  26. Cutting the Values
  27. Quick Counts
  28. The Unseen
  29. A Corollary
  30. Matchmaking
  31. Twin Decks
  32. A Baker's Dozen
  33. Strange Relations
  34. The Rhine Test
  35. Psychic Gambol
  36. 52 Scatter
  37. The Black Castle
  38. Easy Poker
  39. A Force of Sorts
  40. Count Down
  41. Assorted Cards
  42. Stop Action
  43. Significant Bits
  44. Core Memory
  45. Coluria '87
  46. Anything Goes
  47. Numerology, Etc.
  48. Two Person Telepathy
  49. The Silent Partner
  50. Talking Heads
  51. Melange

word count: 81179 which is equivalent to 324 standard pages of text


Reviewed by Larry Finley (confirmed purchase)
★★★★★   Date Added: Saturday 31 December, 2022

This is excellent and has one of the first de Bruijn methods used. Like all of Leo's works, this is very good and a must-have.

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Magic & Conjuring / Cards

Magic & Conjuring / Mentalism & Spiritism