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Modern Card Manipulation
Modern Card Manipulation
Modern Card Manipulation
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Modern Card Manipulation

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First published in 1915, this volume contains a fantastic guide to mastering a variety of card tricks. With over 100 illustrations, “Modern Card Manipulations” will appeal to those with an interest in learning card tricks and is it not to be missed by the budding magician. Contents include: “Fun on the Billiard Table”, “Simple Conjuring Tricks”, “Hand Shadows”, “Indoor Games for Children and Young People”, “Simple Conjuring Tricks that Anybody can Perform”, “Pearson's Book of Fun, Mirth, and Mystery”, “Plays and Displays for Boy Scouts”, “Practice Strokes at Billiards”, “The Drawing-room Entertainer”, etc. Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. It is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially commissioned new introduction.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherWhite Press
Release dateJan 31, 2018
ISBN9781528783514
Modern Card Manipulation

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    Modern Card Manipulation - C. Lang Nell

    Modern Card Manipulation

    THE PRINCIPLES OF NATURAL MAGIC

    IT is the quickness of the hand deceives the eye was a maxim correctly applied to the performances of the earlier conjurers, whose skill was of the juggling order. It is also in some degree applicable to the recent type of coin and card manipulation, which has been made the vogue by several very clever American performers. But as descriptive of the secrets of conjuring and magic (I always use the word in its natural, not the supernatural sense) it is entirely erroneous.

    The magician or the drawing-room conjurer who desires to create real illusions—that is to say, to quite deceive his audience as to all he does—must rely on much more cunningly constructed foundations for his schemes than mere quickness of the hand.

    The juggling order of sleight of hand is most interesting and clever, but is only a branch of natural magic. The performer who takes a card or coin and apparently throws it into space, immediately showing the hand which held it quite empty both back and front, has astonished his audience—he has not deceived them—for, unless aware of the working of the back and front palm, the spectators have no idea what has become of the card or coin. They have not been led to think it is anywhere. They merely wonder what he did with it and admire the quickness of the manipulation which made the object disappear without their being able to follow it. In fact, an extremely smart juggle has been effected.

    Conjuring consists in the performer’s audience being led to believe that certain definite actions have been carried out before them, while they presently discover that the results of those actions are something directly contrary to any natural law.

    They immediately recognise that they have been deceived completely, but without knowing how or when the deception took place, for they are not fools enough, nor is it desired to make them think, that the supernatural has occurred.

    It is thus the mind of the spectator which must be deceived.

    I have often heard conjurers say that boys and young people have much quicker brains than grown-up people. This is quite a fallacy. The difficulty of deceiving young people lies in the fact that their brains, not having had the practice of those of their elders, act more slowly, not more quickly. Display cause to the quick thinker, and effect springs of itself instantaneously before him. Thus the cleverer the man the more easily may the magician deceive him. Take a most simple instance of even the juggling order of magic. The performer has a ball in his hand, and with an upward motion throws the ball into the air. The active mind unconsciously and in a moment associates the effect (the flight of ball in air) with the cause (the upward motion). At the second upward motion of the performer’s hand every eye in the audience follows the upward track, where the ball should rise; and so strong is the perception of repetition, that a distinct interval of time has elapsed before the fact that the effect did not this time follow the cause has reached their minds. That interval has been sufficient for the magician to have vanished the ball just as he may have desired.

    Imitativeness is inherent in every human mind, and lends in the above instance the greatest possible assistance to the magician. It supplements the cause and effect association in the case of the educated mind, and in that of the child’s or uneducated mind is an even stronger ally of the conjurer. As he moves his hand upward his head and eye markedly follow its course and that of the ball in its flight. His head and eye also follow the imaginary flight at the second effort, and every other head and eye in the audience, through unconscious imitativeness, also follow in varying degrees of accuracy both the real and imaginary flight.

    What has happened is that the magician has led his audience away from what has really happened by inference. From the result of the first throw they infer the result of the second, and the inference is emphasised by the conjurer’s gesture in making his head and eyes follow the first and genuine and also the second and false throw.

    There is yet another and more certain method of drawing away the attention of the audience from what is really being done. The performer’s conversation is arranged to divert the minds of those present, and to hold their interest on a subject unconnected with his real doings. They may be directly or indirectly, quietly and slowly, or quickly and suddenly diverted. Speech was given us to conceal our thoughts, and the magician goes one better, and uses it to conceal his actions also. To the drawing-room conjurer the most important weapon of deceit is his cunningly arranged conversation.

    From all this it must not be supposed that skill in legerdemain can be neglected. It is essential that the hand must be in absolute accord with the mind, and let no one fall into the fatal mistake of neglecting the acquirement of a perfect power of manipulation of cards, coins, and all objects to be made use of. In the foregoing remarks this ability is assumed as a sine quâ non, for no amount of diversion of the spectators’ mental and ocular vision will serve if the hands are not ready at the right moment to do their task.

    Sleight of hand is to be acquired by anyone who will give sufficient patience and practice. Hence by emphasising the other principles, which involve more than mere practice.

    In addition to all the above means of mystery, there is at the call of the modern conjurer a wide variety of apparatus. Not the old-fashioned large and showy pieces—I might almost say of furniture—but tricky little devices, the existence of which, far from being used to impress the audience, is never even made known to them.

    Optics, hydraulics, pneumatics, magnetism, electricity, and other sciences are all made the servants at one time or another of the modern conjurer.

    Enough has now been said to put the inquiring mind on the track of the main principles of magic, on which alone a large volume might be filled; but the object of this book is to show the practices used in a variety of card tricks rather than to discourse upon the principles involved.

    Cards of all descriptions, specially suitable for conjuring, are obtainable at Messrs. Hamley Bros., Magical Saloons, High Holborn, London, W.C.; also Bland’s, 35, New Oxford Street, London, W.C.

    MANNER AND GESTURE

    IN drawing-room conjuring these two points are perhaps the principal items contributing to success. What they should be is summed up in the one word natural. A movement or a mannerism which is natural to one person is the opposite when made by another; hence everyone must more or less fix their own method of displaying tricks. The best advice that can possibly be given to the student of natural magic, and, for the matter of that, also to its professed exponents, is, go through every action you have to make in any trick that is to be acquired, actually doing everything which you will pretend to do when displaying the experiment, watching yourself in a mirror as you do so. For instance, if it be necessary to palm a coin whilst apparently transferring it from the right to the left hand. Take your coin, actually place it in the left hand, mark every detail of the whole movement. Now when you come to the make-believe, and the right hand retains the coin, see that the movement presented in the glass coincides exactly in minutest detail with all that you actually did before.

    If something is to be taken from a servante under cover of the picking up of a hat or other object from the table, first take the hat alone, watching your glass, then take the object and hat, seeing that your mirror portrays nothing which was not in the former movement.

    No two people do the simplest of simple actions quite alike. Watch a dozen people pick up a hat from a table; each one will have some variation from the methods of the rest. The conjurer must learn what are his own particular movements and manner in handling objects, picking up objects, dropping objects, etc., so that he can fit his sleight of hand to them. Many a person has special methods of handling things which are particularly adapted to be made use of at such a time; but this such an one would never do, owing to his unconsciousness of his own habits of action.

    As to manner, again, everyone must choose his own. There are three principal styles, which I may term—

    (1) The profound or mysterious.

    (2) The humorous.

    (3) The natural conversational.

    The first is the most difficult to make a success of, for in it the performer must by inference, if not by actual declaration, assume profound powers of magic—one mistake will turn his dignified mystery into the ludicrous—and he voluntarily dispenses with the boniment or patter which is the staple stand-by of his more

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