Preface

WHEN, one warm day this past summer, John Mulholland suggested the editing of this book I agreed with little hesitancy, thinking it would be a pleasant task to re-read the early volumes of "The Sphinx," a simple matter to prepare the best tricks for publication. Two weeks or so, I thought, would see the work through.

So I started through the 49 years. I had planned to read only the tricks, but the articles and pictures and news notes kept distracting me. Reports on the shows of Kellar and Herrmann intrigued me: the rise of young performers such as Thurston and Houdini, not to mention Dante and Blackstone; and most of my contemporaries kept sidetracking my attention from the matter in hand. Then the tricks themselves! Multiply one issue by more than five hundred and you begin to appreciate the problem of combining the best feats into a single book. It would have been far easier to compile five volumes than one. So many choice bits of conjuring had to be put aside. It would astonish you to check in current dealers' catalogues the many tricks which first appeared in "The Sphinx."

A large and excellent group of tricks had to be by-passed because they were already so firmly established as the standard feats of today's sorcerers. Another batch of bafflers had to be put aside because, though the trap doors and special stage mechanisms on which they depended are just as practical today as they were several decades ago, there are few modern wizards who could put them to use. The decline of the theatre and the rise of television, hotel and intimate entertainment has made a special yardstick necessary to measure the value of a feat today. The estimated two weeks stretched into months, but the manuscript began to take shape.

This book is far more than a collection of tricks; it's a procession of the outstanding performers, inventors and writers of magic from 1900 down to today. No one man could possibly have explored so many avenues with so many unusual results. Here then are not only outstanding tricks, but the outstanding men who are responsible for them telling you how to do them. Here is magic for all tastes, all purposes.

Milbourne Christopher