It seems the standard upon which all book tests are measured is Ted Karmilovich's Mother of All Book Tests. Therefore I need to begin by saying that I don't own MOABT and so I can't compare the two. I was considering MOABT when I found Babel, and because the features are similar but Babel is slightly less expensive and includes three books instead of one, I decided on Babel.

The effect I was looking for is: spectator can choose either book, open to ANY page, pick ANY word ... and without looking at the spectator or touching the book you can name the word.

Babel can do that. In fact it even includes two different methods for achieving that effect. The only note is that by "any" word I mean "long" word, which is probably what you want anyway. And yes there are many possible long words to choose from on any given page.

The spectator can handle the books and look through them briefly for a short period of time. They will not withstand close examination for any length of time but when managed properly the spectator will never notice anything. Each individual page looks innocent. The books have chapters complete with half-pages. The sentences all make sense when read in isolation.

Two of the books contain the same contents but have different covers. Those two provide the main features of Babel. The 3rd book is smaller and serves as a way to force a page (from any book). I find the usefulness of the 3rd book slightly lacking. It cannot be examined at all, and it really only has the one useful feature.

Babel also includes several other features (in the to primary books) including the ability to have the spectator open to any page and begin reading from the top, and you can describe the scene told by the first 8 lines - and yes the first 8 lines of every page are different (no you cannot recite the lines word for word, only describe the who / what / where etc.). You also get the ability to know the first word on any page. Plus various memorization features where the spectator can read the first few words of a page and from those words you can tell the spectator the page number and a ridiculous amount of other detail about the contents of the page they are looking at.

All in all I definitely recommend this. You can use Babel by itself to produce some very strong mentalism or you can drop it in right along-side other gaffed book tests and/or non-gaffed books to create a routine involving lots of books and choices from the spectator. I really love it and recommend it to anyone searching for a gaffed book test that can produce very direct and hands-off mind reading or memorization effects.

On going through Babel it was quite obvious that a lot of thought had gone into preparing the Babel Book Test;and,in order for a performer to perform Babel confidently and well a thorough grounding in the methods involved needs to be done.

Definitely not a book test for the casual lackluster performer.What is required is a performer who can bring a sparkle to, wow the audience,put on the gold dust and do justice to Vincent Hedan's brilliant methods in Babel.

If you can do that you definitely won't be disappointed with the product.