Stage Illusions
by Will Goldston

There are the good old illusion books, like the ones of U.F. Grant, which are full of good ideas that are, for the most, still accurate and usable today, and there are other old illusion books, like this one, which have become completely useless for today's performers. Save your money for better books. Even for 6$, you probably won't get any valuable information in this book, for which almost every illusion uses a very complicated setup with trapdoors in the floor, big wire rigs with pulleys passing under the stage, etc. Almost all the methods used would make no sense for today's stage conditions and anyway, today, we have hundreds of better methods to have better effects without all the trouble of those nonsense enormities. Usually, I like reading old illusion books to get inspired for new ideas, but to be honest, I didn't find anything inspiring in this book. Plus, the explanations in a very old English style are often hard to understand and the blurry illustrations, scanned in very low definition, are hard to decrypt and often times, it's even impossible to read the words, letters and numbers written on them. This is the second worst illusion book I have ever read, just to give you an idea of how bad it is...