Review by Andy Martin for The Sphinx – Vols: 1-52, eBook by Lybrary.com
4 out of 5
Never mind the Quality, feel the width!
Ok, so I’m the first to admit that I am totally not a lover of eBooks. I’m sure they will continue to grow in popularity each year since they have four primary advantages over our beloved hardbound originals: they are cheap, they are easy to search, they take up little room, and they last forever. However for me, I want the real thing. Having all my books in some sort of electronic form would be cool too, but for the most part I just want the books.
In the case of The Sphinx, the eBook advantages are huge. These two DVD’s contain almost 17,000 pages or 50 volumes of some of the most important writings in magic history.To buy a full set of The Sphinx, if you can find one, will cost upwards of $5,000 – and then you run the risk of pages falling apart in your hands. Once you do manage to track down a copy that doesn’t fall apart on you, then you have the task of housing them somewhere – a 3 foot shelf is needed!
So this is one eBook that is really worth owning. Chris Wasshuber and his Lybrary.com takes a lot of heat from the book buying magic community, but he is providing a wonderful service to magicians. Particularly for the large or difficult to find volumes. In many cases he is providing access to books that to all intents and purposes cannot be viewed in any other way. When put in that context you can’t argue with the need for eBooks.
Chris is very helpful and dedicated to his task of preserving magic one book at a time. His books primarily ship in an HTML format and I prefer the Adobe PDF format, and he spent quite a lot of time helping me convert my copy into PDF. This was a long and time consuming process, and I thank Chris for helping me do it. However, I do wish he produced these things in PDF up front. I believe that the PDF format and Acrobat is a much better technology and portable platform for eBooks than HTML. Chris has is reasons for using HTML and I’m sure they are fine. But for me PDF is much better, and will continue to get better over time since ADOBE will continue to invest huge resources in it.
This then is my one criticism of the eBook phenomena – it is still early days and the media, software and hardware to view them is still changing. It is not a high-tech, high-gloss world, and particularly in the case of these facsimile versions, where the text itself is not converted, being able to sit down and read them on your computer is not as easy as it could be. You’ll find yourself resizing pages and trying to find the optimum reading set-up.
The Sphinx eBook does come with an impressive index and table of contents which is searchable. If you want to find articles about John Northern Hilliard type it in and 12 articles come back. Of course if you type in John Hilliard nothing comes back which shows up one of the issues with the technology.
I would like to give this 5 stars for time and effort that Chris has put into this. Unfortunately, I believe that as an eBook it could be better and I urge Chris to reconsider using PDF as a medium for his books, and let ADOBE do the development whilst he focuses on finding and converting the books.
Regardless of the technology limitations, this is still a very impressive effort and as a research aid it is invaluable. Just be prepared for the road to be a bit rockier than you might expect. As they say on the old maps: Here there be Dragons …
Review by Timothy Arends for The Learned Pig Project Magic CD No. 1 and 2 by Learned Pig Project
5 out of 5
Years of pleasure from this treasure trove of magic!
Have you ever had one of those dreams were you suddenly come into possession of a huge cache of magic books or apparatus? Nice dream, isn’t it? Unfortunately, when you wake up, the goodies are no longer there. Well, purchasing the Learned Pig CD-ROM book collection is like living this dream–only when you wake up, you still have the stuff!
In short, the Learned Pig collection is a tremendous value for the money. Where else can you get 50 or 60 books for the price of two or three printed volumes?
CD #1 has a marvelous variety of books. Si Stebbins explains his famous card setup in his own words and Stillwell of Stillwell handkerchief ball fame explains his handkerchief manipulation act. There is a very unusual manuscript on the frozen alive stunt, similar to what David Blaine did on live television, and Marco even offers his own very commercial sightless vision act. Plus there are books by Houdini, Robert-Houdin, J B Bobo and many others.
CD # 2 is a card worker’s dream! It has not one but three multivolume encyclopedias of card magic. Card Manipulations by Jean Hugard is in five volumes while More Card Manipulations runs into four volumes. Plus Ellis Stanyon has written four volumes of card effects.
I like CD #1 better than #2 (even though I already had the print edition of eight of the books) because of the greater variety of books, but many magicians will no doubt prefer disk #2. Some of the most outstanding books on CD #1 are the Encyclopedia of Card Tricks by Jean Hugard, Modern Coin Magic by J. B. Bobo and the Expert At The Card Table by Erdnase. Disk #2 includes Expert Card Technique and Royal Road To Card Magic by Hugard and Braue and Annemann’s Practical Mental Effects. These books alone are worth the price of the CDs.
When I got the CDs, I was surprised to find that all the books were saved as a single PDF file on each disk. This makes it impossible for the user to organize or sort the books, for example by author or subject, but it probably makes searching for a specific name or phrase in the entire collection much easier, as well as jumping from one book to another. All of the text in the books was scanned in and transformed via optical character recognition (OCR), into real computer type–text that you can select, copy, and paste into other programs. This means that you can print out just a snippet of a book if you wish, or send an excerpt to a fellow magician in e-mail to get his opinion on something. You can even have the computer, via speech synthesis, read from a book to you while you follow along with coins or a deck of cards in hand. Best of all, converting the books into text format allows searching of the full text of any book, so if you want to find out how to do a particular trick or sleight, you can quickly do a search of the entire collection to find an explanation.
The quality of the conversion to PDF is overall very good. The tables of contents of each book is hyperlinked to take the reader directly to the corresponding section. Some books are even hyperlinked to each other. For example, if you click a mention of an effect in one of the Stanyon books, it will take you directly to that effect, even if the effect is on a different page or in a different book entirely. On rare occasions I have found that a hyperlink does not work–it points to a location on the creator’s computer which, of course, we can’t access. Generally, though, I have found few errors in the books. One quibble is that I would prefer if the illustrations had been saved at a bit higher resolution, but for the most part they are all perfectly legible. I like it when a scan of the front cover of the book is included, as this gives more of a feeling of actually owning the book.
You could get something pretty close to a complete magical education out of the two Learned Pig CDs. There are books on sleight-of-hand magic, non-sleight-of-hand magic, card magic, novel magic, escapes, history, biography, mentalism, illusions and even patter and presentation (including one of the best books on the subject, Our Magic by Neville Maskelyne). There is even a book on self promotion, Making Magic Pay. Although this book is just a tad out of date (having been written while vaudeville was still alive) I suspect that magicians could pick up a few tips from this book even today. Some of the sample promotional letters could even be used with a little updating of the language. True, some of the books, such as the ones on chemical magic and handcuff escapes, are outdated today, but almost all have at least something to offer (and the book on handcuff escapes, written in Houdini’s time, is fascinating for its historical information). All in all, magic changes over the years quite a bit more slowly than, say, the field of computers.
Although this is a review, it is appropriate to add a few words on how to get the most out of this collection. One of the drawbacks of e-books is the inability to make notes in the margins or to mark one’s favorite effects in the table-of-contents. What I have done is to copy and paste the table of contents of each book into a word processing document and save it in an easily accessible place on my computer. That way, I can make all the notes for the book I want in the corresponding section of the word-processing document. Since I need to have my computer running when viewing an e-book anyway, it is no trouble to open this document at the same time I open an e-book.
All of the books in the collection have a colored or patterned frame around each page. These frames are not gaudy or distracting, and they help to differentiate each book from one another. Strictly speaking, you should not need to print any of the books as some of them are very large and you will lose some of the benefits of the electronic format, such as space saving and searchability. However, should you want to print one or two books in the collection, the colored frames around the pages can use up more ink or toner than necessary. One way to get around this is to go to the page setup dialog box in Adobe Acrobat and choose an enlargement percentage of something like 130%. This will increase the size of the page area on each sheet that comes out of the printer and decrease the size of the colored frame, saving ink. Also, needless to say, you should pay very close attention to which pages you want to print, as shown in the page status bar at the bottom of the Acrobat window and, in the print dialogue, enter that range of pages. You do not want to send to the printer all 5000+ pages of books on the CD!
Although it is a nice feeling to get totally free books on the Learned Pig website, it is definitely worth shelling out the money to buy these CDs. One gets so many books for the price, it is almost like getting them for free. The prices for comparable books at another magic e-book seller are much higher. In short, getting these Learned Pig CDs was like finding out a long-lost magician uncle had just died and left me two trunks full of magic books!
Review by Unknown for The Cervon File by Bruce Cervon
1 out of 5
Worthless
I regret to say that this is probably the worst book ever written by a great of magic. I purchased it in the hope to find a choice of inner secrets from the Magic Castle but, apart from a good force (Flip Over Force, page. 193), there is absolutely nothing practical in it. In my opinion this book simply should not be in between those other gems of magical literature. Stay away!
Review by Andy Martin for Mini-Vox Package by Anchor Audio
5 out of 5
Perfect Audio for the Magician!
I always wanted a portable sound system – even though I rarely need it. This package is beautiful! Wonderful sound in a very small package. You can always take it with you just in case. Play your music too!
Makes you feel like a Vegas performer!
I also added a Mini Disk player that was only available in Japan – it is tiny with a tiny remote control, so that you can now not only have a full PA system you can also play music during your act without once going near the table. A much cheaper alternative to some other units on the market!
Review by Andy Martin for Criterion Demo Center by Collectors' Workshop
5 out of 5
Ah look at these beauties!
The Criterion Demo Table fills a great void in my close-up magic performances and practice sessions. I have tried a number of different tables and table tops, but when it comes to performing they all fall short of my requirements. When it comes to close-up you need a larger top and more accessible space beneath to place your new and shown items.
Not only does the Criterion Table look beautiful, it works really well too. The size is perfect for any close-up performance I do and with a lot of easily accessible space beneath the table, I can store my whole act and get to it very easily too.
The display of effects on this table were all made by the talented George Robinson, and what better way to show them off than with a very classy demo table. This is the one to impress them all!
Review by Andy Martin for Color Cube – Deluxe by Viking Mfg.
4 out of 5
Very nice Color Cube!
Sometimes the old and simple effects are the best. This version of the Color Cube by George Robinson is wonderful. In fact, I’ve been trying to think of a routine with two of them so that I can justify buying another!
The size of this is bigger than the kids toy version which lends itself to some very real miracles. The box is Asian mahogany with a hand-rubbed finish and even the cube is hand-crafted with inset acrylic spots, so it can be seen quite easily for close-up and parlor work.
Time to revive this old chestnut, with some imagination! If you spend half of the effort and time that George put into making this, I’m sure you’ll have a very pleasant experience.
Review by Andy Martin for Haunted Bottle (Natural) by Viking Mfg.
5 out of 5
Grab these while you can!
As I look at all the magic I’ve puchased over the last 32 years it becomes very clear to me that there are very few real craftsmen around still making quality magic. Craftsmen like Alan Warner, Mel Babcock, and Richard Gerlitz are all on my list of course. But sometimes I forget to add to that same list: George Robinson of Viking Mfg./Collector’s Workshop. When I look at the quality that he consistently pumps out it is quite amazing, and then you factor in the price – there is noone else in the industry, period, that produces the same quality at the same price.
This little bottle is a wonderful piece that you will be proud to own. It is easy to do and comes with some great ideas. I suggest you snap these up because I don’t know how George is able to offer these at such low prices. For the amount of work involved they are a huge deal!
In fact I would say the same thing about a lot of Viking pieces – George has kept his prices very low for a long time. You can get some of the same effects for less from the rip-off guys, but if you want the real deal pay a fraction more and you will be much happier. Viking quality really shines when you take the time to appreciate it.
I suggest you point your browser to the Viking site and load up on many of the cool effects that George has to offer – I have owned nearly all of the pieces from the current Viking catalog, and only now am really starting to appreciate how much better they are than so much of the other dross out there.
Review by Joey Butler for Mind Chips by Mikame Craft
5 out of 5
A Quick Addition for Multiple Performances
I love this trick. It comes with two possible outcomes in color selection. (I am trying not to give anything away here.) To be able to have both available to me, I cut a "false bottom" out of black felt. That way, I can store the alternative color chip in the bottom of the box and still have it immediately available if someone says, "Hey, do that one with the chips again." This would make this trick more useful for walk around.
Review by Andy Martin for The Satanic Book Test by Brad Henderson
5 out of 5
Finally a Book Test that is Entertaining!
I have owned five different book tests and only performed one of them. The reason is that, with the exception of Lee Woodside’s Dream Revelation, I’ve never really felt that there was much point to them – the methods are often clever (hence their appeal to magicians), but they really lack in entertainment value.
Brad Henderson has come up with a very funny and amazing book test that draws value and entertainment from the books themselves as well as the final revelation. The Satanic Book Test is clearly a performance piece – you can’t just roll it out the afternoon you receive it, and it does require some careful practice and talent to do it justice. The mechanics are easy to grasp, with plenty of tips and subtleties to handle various situations, but you will need to be confident in your acting abilities to pull it off.
This is a "good thing" – if more magicians spent time actually rehearsing their shows we would see better performances. I think in the right hands this could easily become the greatest eight minutes of your act. I plan on spending a long time before I roll this out in my act, but I am confident that I will in fact roll it out, which will make it a very good book test indeed!
As it arrives you get a very well produced 25 page booklet with numerous photos, tips, patter, and subtleties. You will need to purchase the actual books required for the test, but these are readily available.
Highly recommended if you really want to entertain your audiences, rather than just show a few tricks to your friends.
Review by Andy Martin for Fall Apart Table (Ghost Table) by Mephisto-Huis
5 out of 5
Ready for a Heart Attack?
Mephisto of Belguim have a fine line of quality magic – this fall apart table and the matching Fall Apart Chair are no exception. This table is so solid you could stand on it if you desired. There is no sign of gimmicks or anything and its radio controlled. So you can use it quite normally throughout your show, moving it around without fear. But when you press that button, watch out! It comes crashing down to the ground with a thunderous sound! This is how fall apart props should be made. Wonderful to play with and a real surprise for the audience.
This table is so solid I had my 21", 75 lb computer monitor on for a three month period when I was moving last year. I can even stand on it (I’m 215 lbs!).
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