4 Stars

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 …

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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.

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Clean and Convincing, but practice required.

This is a very clean prediction effect. Performed well, it is hard to beat for cleanness in fact.

It has shades of Ultissimo in its method – but without the stand or extra deck, which is a big difference! To do it effectively a sleight is required (the Cull). This is a fairly standard sleight, but if you buy packet tricks and gaffed decks because you don’t like doing any sleights then this might not be for you. It does come with an alternate method that requires less sleight of hand, but it is not as strong.

I can think of at least one way that all sleights could be removed, and to the lay person I’m not convinced they would notice any difference in the effect.

Having said all this the Cull is a very useful one if you don’t already know it, and if you can just break your rules once you will not only have a hugely clean prediction, you will also have a great sleight that you will be able to use for all sorts of things.

As much as the purists like to keep all gaffed cards out of their lives, and the gaffers like to keep all sleights out their lives, sometimes a beautiful mystery comes from the combination of both worlds.

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Beautiful Wood and Funny Routine!

This is my sort of magic these days. It’s made with very nice props that are small and pretty much indestructable. There are no electronics or things to remember or any real set up. And the price is very reasonable.

The routine has great comedy potential and no tricky moves. Instead of just handing out 5 envelopes and you win the one with the $20 bill in as with the usual Bank Night type effect, you have some fun with it. You show these 5 "Turned Discs" that you give the audience the chance to win some cash with. Through a seemingly fair sequence of eliminations you end up with the last remaining disk. It uses a known technique that I have personally never seen or used before, and it works very well.

What makes this different is the way in which you first reveal what each specator won and then what you finally have won. You’re entertaining them with these lines directly related to the words written on each disc, and then wow them at the end as you split open your Disc and pocket the cash!

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A Modern Day Fitzkee?

I love it when intelligent, gifted magicians take time out to really analyze our industry and art. Jamy Ian Swiss, like the greatly respected Trilogy of Dariel Fitzkee, holds no punches and makes some very thought provoking observations on magic, magicians, and mentalism.

In my book anything that makes magicians think twice about what they do and say is a winner. We don’t need more mediocrity in magic; this goes for performers, inventors, dealers, and manufacturers. By reading authors like Mr Swiss maybe our industry can get over its love of itself and actually start to produce great magic and entertainment that was abundant forty or more years ago.

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A Clever Piece that Magician’s will like!

This piece from Mikame Craft is beautifully made with a clever mechanism to allow you to reveal a card or image that is placed beneath the close-up mat.

It is made to the usual high standards of Mikame Craft, though interestingly enough is finished in black instead of their more usual natural wood. It can be used as your close-up case with 3 felt lined drawers to put items, and at any time you can have them choose a card or write on a piece of paper with your back turned. Then to ensure no one can see it you ask them to place the card underneath the mat. When you turn back around you remove from one of the drawers in the unit a pad and paper and proceed to describe the card, etc.

This is one of those effects that will surely please magician’s but it seems a bit unnatural to put it under the mat, what’s wrong with just turning it face down. It’s a small point but worth considering. The way I justify it is that I first have them choose a card freely using a marked deck and get them to put their hand over it. I then reveal their card by stroking the hand and reading the vibes. Then I say "Let’s make it really difficult this time. When I turn my back I want you to take out any card look at it and slip it under the mat so there is no way whatsoever I can know your card." Of course I still get the card right.

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Wow, why the heck has someone not done this before?

This is a a wonderful hanky to vanish a ring. It is heavy weight with a real heavy and sold ring embedded within the hanky, and the mechanism works perfectly.

I immediately pulled out my Samurai as soon as this arrived so that I could add it to my show. This is soooo easy, and so convincing.

Well done George – a great idea with a simple, high quality prop that will last a life time!

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A bit too heavy for me!

This is a very thorough book about the man who susposedly wrote one of the great card Classics: The Expert at The Card Table by S.W. Erdnase. Unfortunately, for me it was a bit too heavy going. Over 430 pages of fairly small type. I managed the first 100 pages and flipped through the rest.

The conclusions reached by Bart Whaley, Martin Gardner and Jeff Busby are the subject of a great deal of contention and there appears to be a lot of evidence to support the theory that S.W. Erdnase was not Milton Franklin Andrews. A great thread on this whole subject can be found on the Genii Forum by clicking here.

I think you would find this very stimulating reading if you were a big fan of Erdnase, but given that I have not read it yet (oh my word!) its hard for me to get too excited by it. I have however just ordered the 100 year Anniversary edition so maybe I will revisit this book another day after I have emersed myself in the classic itself!

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