A Comprehensive Magic Overview from a Master Magician Do you want to explore the secrets of the world of magic? Learn from a master in Jean Hugard's Complete Course in Modern Magic. This manual provides detailed, step-by-step instructions for hundreds of tricks, often accompanied by diagrams. No, your eyes don’t deceive you! Expand your repertoire as a magician by learning mesmerizing tricks, including working with: Balls Coins Playing cards Mental magic Flowers Ropes and cords Rings And much more! This book is perfect for anyone interested in magic—whether you're an aspiring amateur magician putting your act together or a seasoned virtuoso.

In this classic manual, a successful stage magician reveals the secrets of a host of mystifying tricks including "The Lemon and Note Trick," "The Miser's Dream," and "The Watch in the Loaf of Bread"-plus swallowing a watch, transforming a cigarette into a silk handkerchief, producing bouquets of real flowers from a borrowed hat and distributing them to the spectators, pulling a live rabbit (or guinea pig) out of a hat, and much more. Clear, comprehensive and enhanced with 240 detailed diagrams and illustrations, this indispensable resource belongs in the library of every would-be magician or magic lover. 240 black-and-white illus. Introduction. Index.

The most complete treatise on sleight-of-hand coin conjuring, including best traditional methods and modern innovations. Guides you systematically from basic techniques, through integrated tricks to complete acts, 18 in all. 510 clear illustrations.

This volume presents editions of two fascinating anonymous and untitled manuscripts of magic produced in Elizabethan England: the Antiphoner Notebook and the Boxgrove Manual. Frank Klaassen uses these texts, which he argues are representative of the overwhelming majority of magical practitioners, to explain how magic changed during this period and why these developments were crucial to the formation of modern magic. The Boxgrove Manual is a work of learned ritual magic that synthesizes material from Henry Cornelius Agrippa, the Fourth Book of Occult Philosophy, Heptameron, and various medieval conjuring works. The Antiphoner Notebook concerns the common magic of treasure hunting, healing, and protection, blending medieval conjuring and charm literature with materials drawn from Reginald Scot’s famous anti-magic work, Discoverie of Witchcraft. Klaassen painstakingly traces how the scribes who created these two manuscripts adapted and transformed their original sources. In so doing, he demonstrates the varied and subtle ways in which the Renaissance, the Reformation, new currents in science, the birth of printing, and vernacularization changed the practice of magic. Illuminating the processes by which two sixteenth-century English scribes went about making a book of magic, this volume provides insight into the wider intellectual culture surrounding the practice of magic in the early modern period.

"Modern Magic" is a treatise in book form, detailing the apparatus, methods and tricks used by the magicians and conjurors. It was the first book in the English language to really explain how to perform magical feats. The treatise contains advice on the appearance, the dress and the staging of a magician. It then goes on to describe many tricks with playing cards, coins, watches, rings, handkerchiefs, dominoes, dice, cups, balls and hats, and concludes with a long chapter of miscellaneous tricks, including magic with strings, gloves, eggs, rice and some utility devices. The penultimate chapter describes large stage illusions, and the final chapter contains advice on routining a magic show, as well as more advice on staging.