Magic Tricks

It seems that the recent trend among magicians has been to release every half-baked idea they conceive as a one-trick DVD. Eric Mead fought this trend by spending twenty years as a professional magician without publishing a book. "Posthumously. That used to be my stock answer whenever I was asked when I might publish a book of original magic." So when someone with that strong of a will finally gives in to writing a book, it is inevitably worth every penny.

All of these effects come straight out of his working repertoire. Mead once tweeted, "When a magician is selling a routine 'directly from my working repertoire' it almost always means he doesn't work very much." These are harsh words for most magic creators, but once you read how well thought out his routines are, you realize why he has the right to feel that way about most products. In a "catch all" style of book like this, wherein the magician describes a couple of tricks for every possible genre of magic (and this book does contain powerful tricks for close-up, stand-up, stage, mentalism, walk-around, kids shows, etc), it's unbelievable how Mead has fully thought out every single trick in terms of method, structure, presentation, pocket management, and situation. No matter what your specialization is within magic, there will be an effect for you.

And for the card guys, the two essays "Disorderly Conduct" and "Jazz Charts & Favorite Licks" will expand your repertoire tenfold. In "Disorderly Conduct", an essay on the memorized deck, Mead explains how to disguise a stacked deck throughout both false and real shuffles, even allowing a spectator to shuffle the cards, and always return to stack order through the procedure of other tricks. This way, you can perform non-stack tricks in the middle of a set of tricks with a stack. He even teaches a trick whereby the spectator unknowingly re-stacks the four aces (only works for Aaronson, though). Best of all, it's a great trick that can fool magicians!

In my favorite essay, "Jazz Charts & Favorite Licks", Mead teaches his approach to the trick that cannot be explained. Try this, and you will create situations for miracles to occur with an ordinary deck of cards. His approach has much more to do with thinking ahead and treating it as more of a routine of effects rather than one effect, essentially treating it like playing jazz. And just like how John Coltrane could improvise on a single song for two hours but give it the contour and variety of an entire set, this approach to TTTCBE could fill an entire show full of special tricks created on the spot, never to be experienced again.

This book is not for beginners; sleights like the Zarrow Shuffle and the classic force are unexplained, though references to essential magic texts are provided. But for those prepared enough to handle the material, books this good are rare in the magic community. As Teller says in the introduction, "There is no bullshit, not a nugget, between these covers. If you're like me, you'll emerge changed, inspired, and tingling. Everything you'd expect from the performance of a real artist." I'm eagerly awaiting his next book.