I mentioned that people waste money at Blackpool. Lets drill into that a little.
Much to my shame I am on Facebook and I’m a member of quite a few Facebook groups for magicians. Three for actual physical clubs I’m a member of, about six attempting to set themselves up as online equivalents to magic clubs, countless which have virtually no posts ever and one which by far I get more notifications on than any other.
That particular squeaky wheel is Second Hand Magic, and right now it’s pretty much on fire. It always is in the late February to mid-March period.
What’s special about this time? It’s just after Blackpool of course!
There are three kinds of sale in the Blackpool rush. The first type is the week before Blackpool in which people try to sell off old magic tricks to generate cash for new ones.
The second type of sale is after Blackpool when people have bought so many new tricks that they need to free up space by purging old ones.
The third type is near the end of this period when people have played with their new magic tricks and realise they don’t want them any more. This hasn’t started yet this year but I’m looking forward to finding out what this year’s big sellers are later this month.
When you try to explain this huge secondary market for magic tricks to lay people¹ the reaction tends to be disbelief in how many magic tricks there actually are. I think if questioned the average muggle would guess that there are about 20 magic tricks in the whole history of the world. If you asked a lay person to name all the magic tricks they could think of the list would look singing like this:
- The one where you cut someone up
- The one where you pick a card
- The one with the ropes
- The one where you go in the box
- The one with the wooden duck
- The one with the phone in the bottle²
- The one where you catch a bullet in your mouth
- The one with the doves
- The one where you tear up a newspaper
- The one with the cups and the balls
- The one with the box and the knives
- The one where a vehicle appears
- The one where an elephant disappears
- The one where you push a little hanky into your fist
- The one my uncle used to do³
- The linking rings
The actual number of magic tricks is frankly ridiculous. The magic circle library contains thousands of books, each of which contains somewhere between 10 and 100 magic tricks, and that’s not even an exhaustive collection of the books which have been published.
In the 80s magic instructions started to come on VHS and later DVD and I don’t even want to guess how many of those have been produced.
If you examine a single genre of trick you will find hundreds of variations, and when I say genre, I don’t mean a wide genre like card tricks. I mean specific plots, such as a card repeatedly coming to the top of the deck.
Every so often there is a kind of renewed interest in a specific plot, often due to it entering the public consciousness from a TV performance or something similarly notable in the magic world.
Most recently this has happened with the plot of a signed card appearing in a box which has been on view throughout the entire performance, passing something through a banknote without damaging it, and having a named card appear at a freely named numerical position in the deck. The first time I saw this trend however was the trick known as the torn and restored card.
The plot of the torn and restored card is not new, the oldest variation I can think of is the classic card in orange, wherein a chosen card is torn to little bits, one piece is kept aside and all the others are vanished. An orange is then cut open and inside is the card in one piece but with a tiny gap, usually a corner, that the retained piece fits in perfectly.
Every magician reading already knew what card in orange is but I explained it anyway in the hope that at least a few would think about just how bloody strange the sequence of events involved is.
There are lots of versions of the torn and restored card, some which are partial restorations (there is a piece missing like above) some are complete restorations, some use the missing piece to prove authenticity, some use a signed card, some are instant restorations, some are piece by piece, some are torn in half, some are torn in quarters, some have only a small piece of the card torn off, some show the front of the card, some show the back of the card, some are examinable after the restoration, some are examinable before the restoration, some are examinable during the restoration, some are impromptu some require a prepared card, some require extra bits and pieces to make it work, some are easy, some are hard, some restore the card with a piece changed or reoriented, and the list goes on.
There is no perfect torn and restored card just as there is no perfect pasta sauce. Some people like it chunky or spicy or sweet. The difference is, most people know that they want a chunky or a spicy pasta sauce before they even go to the supermarket. Most magicians don’t know what they want and because of the way magic tricks are marketed they don’t even know what they’re getting. If you want to go with this analogy, it’s like every single pasta sauce on the market tastes bad, but in a different way. So you buy one and it’s too spicy, but there’s another which markets itself as “less spicy!” but you buy it and it’s too watery, but there’s another marketed as “thicker and less watery!” but you buy that and it’s too coarse and chunky, but there’s another sold as “nice and smooth, no hard lumps” but when you buy it it’s TOO DAMN SPICY AGAIN. Then a new one hits the shelves which says “nice and smooth, not too thick, not too runny, isn’t spicy at all, the perfect sauce.” and you think finally, and but buy it and it tastes of vinegar. You didn’t even know that was possible, and now you have another problem to look out for.
Except in magic, those awful flavours are methods, and every trick has a method and I can guarantee that every method is bad in some way. It’s hard to learn, or it uses a delicate prop which might break or it cant be examined or it uses magnets and sticks to all the other metal objects in your pocket, or it looks bad from some angles, or you have to spend hours preparing something before the show. This isn’t a modern problem, in fact it’s arguably better than it used to be, because at least now magic trick adverts are videos which show the trick so you’re not relying on artists impressions and 4 line descriptions in the back of catalogues.
I was going to include a paragraph here about my history learning different methods of the plot of the Torn and Restored Card, but frankly no one has ever described this process better than American magician Master Payne’s story of the Coin in Bottle.
Last night I was talking about my own journey with the Torn and Restored Card with a new member of the Ipswich Magical Society and he told me that he had a friend who had gone through a similar ordeal and one day said he’d found the one, the perfect method to tear and restore a card, none of the fiddly bits of methodology, this one was the genuine torn and restored card he’d been looking for, none of the tricky methodological hitches, describing it as if it was real magic. The end of the story is that after telling his friends that he had ordered it he never mentioned it again, presumably because the method was so disappointing he was ashamed to have been so excited.
I wanted to end on a note not entirely unlike that one, but it seems a little downbeat so let me offer a glimmer of light. In the world of magic right now there are hundreds of people whose livelihoods depend on a constant flow of new magic, from publishers and magic shop owners, to the magicians themselves who have brilliant minds creating these new methods and wanting to share them with the wider magic community⁶. Unlike the rest of capitalism however, we have the option as consumers to temper our participation in this process. The newer supposedly better variants of magic tricks were all developed by people who started with the same basic imperfect methods we learned. They worked them and improved them and created something which was uniquely ideal for their taste. They made their own perfect pasta sauce, like me in university when I added extra mushrooms to a jar of Ragu. Consider the following:
Paraphrasing Art House Confidential, when incredibly famous or prolific magicians lecture at Blackpool the only question anyone in the audience really wants to ask is “How do I become you?”
There are a number of magicians who, when they release a book or DVD or product line, will capitalise on this fact by including, paraphrased somewhere in the ad copy, “These are the tricks that have taken me to the peak of my career.” Phrases such as “Reputation Maker”, “Personal Repertoire” and “Signature effects” often feature. The implied statement is that you need this book or DVD or product to succeed to their level. Sometimes they’re even brazen enough to openly say “You need this”.
But when you see something like this remember: They didn’t need this book to make it as far as they did. They did it without the book, they figured it out for themselves using much older and less exclusive advice and so can you.
Forge your own path.
Or be a reclusive shut in like me, I don’t care.
Knock yourself out losers.
¹ Lay people or lay folk is a classic term used by magicians for non-magicians. Unfortunately it is also used by Masonic orders as a term for non members. Recently magicians have taken to using the J.K. Rowling inspired Muggles to refer to non-magicians, but this is also often used by Harry Potter fans to refer to non Harry Potter fans. Really it’s about time magicians came up with their own terminology to avoid confusion.
² Thanks Dynamo, ever since your TV show every single coin in bottle routine now looks shit.
³ Everyone’s uncle trick is different but almost everyone has one. The one my uncle (or a friend of my uncle, I only ever met him once at a wedding) used to do was the four burglars, which I later learned is a higher calibre of trick than many other uncles did, although not the best uncle trick I’ve ever heard of. Let’s not forget that some of the most famous magicians in the world have niblings⁴.
⁴ Gender neutral form of neice and nephew.
⁵ Only do one effect at a time. If you make a ball disappear from one place and appear somewhere else, it’s magic. If you put a red ball in your hand and open it to reveal a green ball, it’s magic. If you make a red ball disappear and reveal a green ball somewhere else, people will start to question if it is the same ball. Or to put it another way “Not only did I restore your card but it is now the 3 of spades.”
⁶ For the five or six people out there saying “If they want to share them they don’t have to sell them, they could give them away,” I just want to remind you that we are all striving to survive in this capitalist hellscape and until we can free ourselves from its economic manacles, every prestoletariat⁷ deserves to receive fair payment for their labour.
⁷ A portmanteau of proletariat and prestidigitation.