This isn’t going to be one of those clever high theory meta contextual posts I’m known for by my one reader. This is about a prop which most magicians know, very few use, and many have simply forgotten about. This post is about the Gozinta Box.
The Gozinta box, in case you don’t know is a pair of boxes, each of which consists of an inner box and a lid which fits snugly over the top. The boxes are different colours to highlight the interesting property that gives the boxes their unusual name: the fact that either box can fit inside the other.
That is to say you can open a red box, take out a blue box, open the blue box, close the red box, put it inside the blue box and then close the blue box.
By itself, a fun effect, but it has a much more interesting application.
A pair of Gozinta boxes comes apart into 4 pieces, which when performed with large boxes makes a standing performance without a table an absolute pain. For most of the process you need to be holding one assembled box and two open halves of the other box, all in separate hands.
Most people don’t have 3 hands.
This does however have a huge advantage in a closeup setting with smaller boxes. You can just give the entire assembled set of both boxes to a spectator, have them open it to get to a fifth item in the middle, handing you the parts one at a time, so that you can reassemble the outer box and close the inner box around it and hand it back.
What this means is as they hand you the first parts you can easily load a new object into the middle, hand the box back to them and next time they’re opened, a new item will have appeared in there, as if by magic. This has been used for an inexhaustible sponge ball effect, a spectators ring to box effect, and others.
A box you can load, while showing it’s empty, is a pretty versatile thing… scale it back up for the stage and you could even load a small animal from a table edge, Tarbell style.
The problem is that Gozinta boxes come in very few sizes. The big size are too small for a rabbit too large for closeup, the small ones aren’t big enough to load more than a grape… Maybe a walnut at a push. If only there was a way to make a Gozinta box of any size… Well now there is!
In my capacity as a computer programmer I have created a tool which generates Gozinta boxes of arbitrary size as .stl files, ready for 3D printing. It runs in your browser and generates the 3D data on demand.