Review: Modern Magic.: A Practical Treatise or The Art of Conjuring.

Modern Magic.: A Practical Treatise or The Art of Conjuring. by Angelo John Lewis Hoffmann
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A thorough presentation of the state of the conjurer's art at the time of its publication (1876), detailing a number of tricks and variations on them. This includes tricks with cards, coins, handkerchiefs, watches, rings, dominoes, dice and the like, and the still widely popular cups and balls. The instructions are comprehensive and clear, and accompanied with diagrams of special apparatus and of the methods of manipulation. Many of the tricks don't require any special apparatus or preparation, but rely purely on manipulation of everyday objects.

I'm sure the magician's art has come a long way in the subsequent century and a half, but the foundation is still sleight of hand and cleverly constructed apparatus. I'm sure a modern aspiring magician could probably still find inspiration here, and many of the tricks have likely remained unchanged in their essentials.

This would also be a great book to read if you were thinking of writing a magician character in the late 19th century, or even some other-world equivalent. I'm not currently thinking of doing that, at least not seriously, but if I ever do, I'll return to this book for material.

One of the key points I took from it, which applies to clever mystery stories too: if a magician ever wants you to believe that an object is somewhere, it is inevitably somewhere else, and if they want you to believe that it's a particular object (say, the one they borrowed from an audience member), you can rely upon the fact that it is not that object but a substitute. If they want you to believe that something is happening at a particular time - like an object moving from one place to another - that thing has definitely already happened. Anything the magician says or does openly is intended to mislead or distract, and nothing is as it seems.

All of this reminds me very much of the kind of mysteries you get in, say, the TV show Death in Paradise, which my wife and I are currently watching in sequence from the beginning. If anyone has a rock-solid alibi for the time of the crime, you should suspect that the crime did not, in fact, take place at that time, or if it did, that the alibi has been faked. If someone claims that the victim was dead when they found them, suspect them of killing the victim after their apparent discovery (probably having previously rendered them unconscious or duped them into pretending to be dead). If a room appears to have been locked with just the victim inside, either it wasn't really locked, or it was locked in some clever way that only made it look as if it had been locked from the inside, or the victim died after locking it themselves, or... You get the point.

Another interesting point he makes is that you should never do the same trick twice in the same way, but if you create the same effect twice in two different ways, you can use the opportunity to show something with each method that would make the other method impossible. The audience will assume that both tricks were done the same way, since the effect is the same, and so won't guess either method.

The author has one verbal peculiarity: he sometimes says "either" when he means "any," for example referring to "either of the four categories". It's pretty clear from context what he means, though.

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