Most of the coins we use in magic aren’t really circulating modern currencies. The big two are the American half dollar and the old English penny. I call them the big three because their size is what makes them uniquely suited for coin magic, and the third is fake Chinese currency minted in that exact same size.
Most of the sleights described in the foundational text of coin magic were formulated and refined around the currency in common use at the time of its publication in 1952. Both the old English penny and the American half dollar left common circulation in the 1970s, which is why to get one now you have to buy them from a magic shop. Or do you?
American half dollars, though no longer ordered in bulk for circulation, are still minted for collections. Circulated half dollars are still out there, though far rarer, and while checking my facts on Wikipedia, I discovered that the circulating supply has been topped up in 2021, presumably to counter the reverse quantitative easing of the coins being sent around the world for the purposes of arbitrage through magic shops.
Meanwhile, old English pennies often turn up in antique fairs by the bagful and are in demand for use in vintage coin operated machines. The old English pennies I use (other than the first five I bought for 20p each from a magic shop in London) all come from a vintage arcade in Great Yarmouth where a pound will net you a bag of fifteen. The intention is that you use them to play the old arcade machines on site, thus allowing the owners to recirculate them, but fuck their business model, mommy needs some copper.
Imagine for a moment that it was 1970 and you knew old English pennies (or as they were known locally at the time, ‘pennies’) were about to drop out of circulation. You are also a close up magician whose act entirely revolves around borrowing said coin from the audience¹. What are you going to do?
Well what you could do is make sure you had a few of those coins to use in your show. Maybe some backups in case you lose a couple. But at that point you have to change your script because you need to explain why you’re carrying your own coin instead of using whatever new fangled decimal shit the government foists onto the general public.
For a certain segment of magicians, this is the circumstance we treat as the status quo. Sleight heavy coin magic is performed with a small handful of coins the performer brings with them, either old English pennies, half dollars or some brass washers decorated to resemble what people think Chinese coins look like². As such they don’t have the same emotional attachment as actual spendable money. When magic theorists say things like “tricks with money have an emotional resonance” and then proceed to use out of circulation coinage, I can barely contain my cynicism.
There are however a vast number of magicians who do magic with borrowed coins, many of which hinge on having specially altered coins designed to resemble modern coinage. I will deal with that particular edge case at a later date. Today I want to focus on things like coin bends, coin waltz, effects where there is an expectation of the coinage being returned at the end, in some kind of altered form, as a souvenir. That kind of includes a routine my friend Wayne does where he performs a 3 coins across using 2p pieces, which he then lets an audience member keep after making the last coin jump across into their own hand (the David Roth coins across finale for those doing their reading).
My solution to an audience denomination shortage, changes in constituent metals and a cashless society are identical: Get a big jar and go to the seaside.
In this year of 2021, at virtually every seaside resort in the uk you will find amusement arcades with machines that look like this:
The ecology of these machines is as follows:
Holiday makers bring a £10 note to the arcade, and over the course of an hour, exchange it a couple of quid at a time for bags of 2p coins. These coins are dropped into the above machine, where it pushes around the coins already inside, causing some to leave via the front, and many to slide down pressure release gaps at the sides. Often the coins falling for the customers will carry with them cheap plastic trinkets. Ultimately however, all the coins will be consumed by the machine. Then at the end of the day, those coins are re-bagged and exchanged for the next £10 which comes in through the front door. What’s important is that very people leave with the coins, and very few people bring their own coins, so most of the 2p pieces rotating through the older arcades of great Britain are likely the same ones that came into circulation in 1971, which were made of solid copper. Any arcade opened since then will likely be stocked with the coins that were in common circulation at the time, and until 1991 they were solid copper too.
So, it’s one week from now and you’ve been to the coast with £400 and a magnet, you’ve systematically changed your money for 2ps, kept anything the magnet couldn’t hold, put the rest into the machines and done the same test on anything that came out. Now what? Chances are, you made some losses, but you’ve obtained a sack of 2ps at a cost of about 5p each. Giving these away has approximately half the cost as a double faced card³. Now you need to use them, and depending on when you enact this plan will change how it plays out.
In short: are people still using money in your lifetime?
For anyone finding this blog in the future and wanting an answer for how to find coins in a post cash world… stick around to the end. If you’ve already got your oversized pickle jar full of copper coins however, you’re in luck. A post cash economy gives you an ideal premise to include them in a routine and give them away.
How many times have you seen a magician bring out some wooden prop they bought from a magic shop and introduce it as “This antique haunted box was given to me by my grandfather…” or treat cheap costume jewellery as magical amulets, glass beads as powerful crystals. The list goes on. Props are props. Wouldn’t it be great just once to get an actual antique item into your spectators hands, imbue it with magical properties and then let them keep it?
Just bring out a drawstring velvet bag full of them and you can say: “Before we used Dogecoin⁴ through Teslapay apps, people bought things with these discs of metal.” Let them pick one, examine it, sign it, and at the end they get to keep it! Maybe you can sign the other side, what a memento.
But wait, we don’t yet live in a post-monetary utopia/dystopia (delete as appropriate when the time comes, make me seem like a mad prophet) how do we excuse bringing out a bag of coins.
I’m so glad you asked.
This was a tricky question for a while, I tossed around a load of ideas about joking that the management paid you up front, telling people you didn’t want them getting distracted rummaging for change, but the march of time has provided an answer all of its own.
“Do you have an idea how many people have touched a coin in circulation? Me neither, that’s why I sterilise mine.”
When I came up with that line I felt like I’d briefly peeked through the matrix and seen the curvature of space time. Ideas that good can’t be wielded by an individual, they have to be shared; like the recipe for insulin or an infinity stone.
One last problem.
The year is 2067, cars run on renewable electricity stored in hydrogen fuel cells, Britney Spears has just been sworn in as president of the United States of America, and in the Scottish territory once known as England, money has just been replaced by a sort of orb you keep in your rectum. The rest of Europe has been using it for over a decade but thanks to byzantine rules enacted to end our six year absence from the EU, we’ve held off, mostly at the behest of magicians terrified that they can’t perform Coinvexed on a crystalline circuit inside a sphere up the spectators arse. Either way you just came across this blog the day after the last coin was melted down to make a statue commemorating the renaming of Little Caledonia (it used to be called Greater London?) because you were madly googling how the hell you’re going to perform signed coin to nest of envelopes, and now you’re fucked. You went to the coast and the coin pusher machines are now sealed units where credits come straight off your Buttcoin and when the little metal disks fall they just get recycled by the machine⁵ as it ejects little paper tickets to exchange for ethically sourced an reasonably priced prizes at the desk. By all accounts this world is perfect, but you’ve got gigs all month and about 4 quid in coppers you picked up from an antique store. What are you going to do?
Obviously I don’t know what kind of technological advancements will exist in such an ideal future, but at the point when legal tender is discontinued, there is zero incentive not to start making your own coins using home casting equipment. If 3D printing has moved on a little, maybe you could even make your own positive master designs!
Alternatively, why not look into having your own coins minted from one of the many companies which mint collectable memorabilia and challenge coins? Admittedly, compared to the cost of using coins in common circulation, this is quite steep in anything less than massive bulk quantities, but in a post scarcity anarchist utopia, that should be of little concern.
If on the other hand, you just want to do some magic without harkening back to a bygone era of outmoded economic systems… well, I have a few ideas for you next time.
¹ In the modern age this notion probably seems absurd, but to quote The Art of Legerdemain by Edwin Sachs:
“For all general purposes, a well conditioned florin will be found the best coin for the beginner; although, of course, he[sic] must, in time, be able to manipulate slippery half-crowns and pennies with equal ease. Florins, as a rule, are more readily procurable in these days, but few half crowns being coined in comparison with them.”
And I thought I used too many commas.
² These designs are often replicas of ancient Chinese coins. An average western audience is bizarrely far more well acquainted with these than with modern Chinese Renminbi coins, primarily because replicas of ancient coins are commonly mass produced as part of tacky low cost feng shui decorations.
³ a pack of double facers is about £7.50, with 52 cards, that makes them about 15p each, assuming you can use all 52 for the trick you have in mind. Doc Eason sells a deck of double facers that are all cards with a lot of white space for signatures and such, but at a cost of £20, that makes each card 37p. Economies of scale are a hell of a thing.
⁴ This is a joke, I used Dogecoin because it’s the cryptocurrency taken least seriously by everyone except Elon Musk, a charismatic individual who is able to generate a little extra spending money by tweeting about crypto and immediately reaping the benefits of a minor fluctuation in exchange prices. He and his ilk will be the first against the wall if the revolution comes and I secretly hope he dies on Mars and the other colonists have to eat him to survive.
⁵ This part of my prophecy has already come to pass. Not the Buttcoin, President Britney, Scottish Kingdom stuff, but there are already arcades in America where credits are loaded onto swipe cards and coins in pusher machines are simply circulated inside for the dispensing of prize tickets. Truly a dark future for numismatists. Still, back in the EU in 5 years by my estimate, that’ll be fun.