CARL JONES

Carl Waring Jones, Princeton 1911, was truly an intellectual. He was by

temperament, intelligence, and experience the ideal man to undertake the
project.
He inherited from his father, Herschel V. Jones, a love of fine books both
antiquarian and contemporary, and he was a connoisseur of great prints. He
coauthored a book with John Day after World War I titled Attainable Ideals in
Newspaper Advertising.
After WorId War II, he joined two other men in starting the History Book Club [still
an ongoing enterprise].
As the publisher of The Minneapolis Journal, he knew every facet of printing; and
he knew how to produce a well printed book on quality paper, competently
illustrated, and beautifully bound.
His lifelong enthusiasm and love of magic were boundless and infectious.
He also had the happy capacity for making people do more than they ever
thought they could.
If he was an exacting task master, he knew the end product would justify the
means.
He worked as hard as anyone as he guided his books to conclusion with a firm and
steady hand and attained the high degree of excellence he always knew to be
possible.
The project required unlimited patience which would have forced a lesser man to
give up the ghost.
When the Hilliard notes were delivered to him, they filled several suitcases, just a
collection of pieces of paper of all sizes and shapes packed helter-skelter with
little rhyme or reason. First came the necessity of making order out of chaos .
His commodious house was ideal for the sorting entailed, and there must have
been something stimulating about laboring over the notes in a library with
etchings of Durer, Zorn, and Rembrandt as silent observers.
Then came the enormous correspondence required in writing to magicians
everywhere to clarify their notes and descriptions. In many cases, Mr. Hilliard had
jotted down the barest bones of an effect with the name of the one who showed
it to him.
Sometimes there were only the title and contributor's name. I do not believe that
anyone else could have carried out this task as competently as Carl Jones did, and
I doubt that anyone else would even have tried.
I think it well to interject here a word of caution about who created certain effects
or techniques.
When anyone showed Mr. Hilliard an effect or sleight and described it, he would
make the notes and ascribe it to the one who showed it to him but who may not
necessarily have been the creator.
I remember asking Stewart Judah about a card force ascribed to him on p. 197.
Stewart said simply, "You showed it to me." I had created it to have a surefire
force which would preserve a stack of cards intact, but that detail was left out of
the description.
Mr. Jones was able to make some corrections in this regard through his
correspondence but probably not all. There was nothing devious nor malicious in
these errors.