This is an incredible handbook on magic tricks for entertainment at home or at social gatherings. The author explains and simplifies many of the best magic tricks and illusions for beginners. These fantastic tricks can be mastered in a few hours, and one would not need expensive resources to perform them but items that are readily available in households. These items include handkerchiefs, coins, oranges, eggs, a glass bowl, etc. In addition, the author gives friendly suggestions in between the tricks and quick tips on how to keep the audience engaged so that they don't lose interest in the middle of the act. Children can learn the art in a significantly short time through this fascinating magic book to amuse and astonish their friends, family, or neighbors. It includes manuals on famous tricks like "the dancing egg," "the walking cent," "heads or tails," etc.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.

One of the world's most famous magicomedians and ventriloquists discusses every aspect of his art, revealing a wealth of insider's tricks. Schindler shows how to cultivate a variety of voices and offers helpful suggestions for putting an act together, developing comedy material and scripts, and handling bookings and publicity. 38 figures and photos.

This book puts ventriloquism in the same category as magic, because they both involve tricks of the eye and illusions.

Learn how to cut off someone's nose without hurting him and how to double your pocket money. Make an egg dance and a penny walk, produce feathers and candy from a silk handkerchief, and change a bowl of ink into clear water with swimming goldfish. With a little time, practice, and the help of this guide, aspiring magicians can astonish their friends and family with these and other classic parlor tricks. Designed especially for beginners by an expert in the art of legerdemain, the book presents simplified versions of popular illusions. Easy to obtain, inexpensive props include coins, handkerchiefs, eggs, and other common household items. In addition, the final third of this volume offers an introduction to the history and practice of ventriloquism.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1877.

ÒFaith cometh by hearingÓÑso said Saint Paul, and devoted Christians from Augustine to Luther down to the present have placed particular emphasis on spiritual arts of listening. In quiet retreats for prayer, in the noisy exercises of Protestant revivalism, in the mystical pursuit of the voices of angels, Christians have listened for a divine call. But what happened when the ear tuned to GodÕs voice found itself under the inspection of Enlightenment critics? This book takes us into the ensuing debate about Òhearing thingsÓÑan intense, entertaining, even spectacular exchange over the auditory immediacy of popular Christian piety. The struggle was one of encyclopedic range, and Leigh Eric Schmidt conducts us through natural histories of the oracles, anatomies of the diseased ear, psychologies of the unsound mind, acoustic technologies (from speaking trumpets to talking machines), philosophical regimens for educating the senses, and rational recreations elaborated from natural magic, notably ventriloquism and speaking statues. Hearing Things enters this labyrinthÑall the new disciplines and pleasures of the modern earÑto explore the fate of Christian listening during the Enlightenment and its aftermath. In SchmidtÕs analysis the reimagining of hearing was instrumental in constituting religion itself as an object of study and suspicion. The mysticÕs ear was hardly lost, but it was now marked deeply with imposture and illusion.