M
Y own experience of magic has taught me that all magical effects come under one of the following seven headings:A Production or Creation. 1. A Disappearance. 2. A Transformation. 3. A Transposition. 4.
An Apparent Defiance of Natural Laws. 5.
An Exhibition of Secret Motive Power. 6.
Apparent Mental Phenomena. 7.
I will take the first division--tricks of production or creation--and endeavour to give a general explanation of how this type of effect may be obtained.
If the conjurer is using his hands alone, it is obvious that the coin or other small object which he wishes to produce must first be concealed there. The majority of people explain all tricks by this secret. They say, "He had it in his hand; he palmed it." It is, perhaps, for this reason that amateurs think too highly of palming. Palming, after all, consists merely in concealing a coin or other small object in the hand.
There are many ways of doing this. You may have the coin in the fork of the thumb, under the first joint of the thumb, between two fingers, under the second and third fingers closed down to hold it, or, lastly, you can use the orthodox and best method, in which the coin is concealed in the palm of the hand and held there by a slight contraction of the muscles. Palming is not easy, and I dare say I shall gladden the heart of many an amateur when I add that palming is not indispensable. Some of the best tricks have been produced without palming or sleight-of-hand--it is generally understood--in any form. In most books on conjuring elaborate directions are given as to how coins cards, balls, and other small objects should be palmed I do not believe in such
directions, for it is obviously absurd to direct that a coin should be palmed by being placed in a certain spot in the hand, because no two hands are quite alike. When you have concealed a coin in your hand in such a way that you
can hold your hand in a natural position, neither too stiffly nor too loosely, without dropping the coin, you have learned to palm.
During recent years conjurers have become discontented with the ordinary palming of a coin, and have gone on to learn what is known as "the continuous palm, back and front". At first the front of the hand is shown to be empty; then the back of the hand is turned to the audience, and that, too, is empty; then the coin is produced at the tips of the fingers. The secret is simple enough. When the coin is at the back of the hand, it is gripped between the first and little fingers. When it is necessary to get the coin to the front of the hand, the middle and third fingers make the coin revolve while it is still held between the first and little fingers. To perform this "continuous palm" one must be prepared to spend many months in practising it; and when it is learned, the amateur is very little better off than the conjurer who discovered that he could produce all the effect of the "back and front continuous palm" by the simple means of having a loop of catgut passed through a small hole in the coin and dropped over the thumb. The catgut is practically invisible.
If the amateur wishes to palm a coin, he should not forget that the mere ability to hold a coin concealed in the palm is of little use to him unless he turns it to practical account--in other words, unless he is going to learn some trick in which it is necessary that he should be able to palm a coin.
Cards can also be concealed by having them palmed already in the hand, and they can be treated almost in the same way as coins. I do not advise an
amateur to waste a. lot of time in learning how to manipulate the cards, because some of the best card tricks can be performed without any
sleight-of-hand. The amateur should bear in mind that all sleight-of-hand is only a means to an end, and that if that end can be reached in a more direct way, then sleight-of-hand is of no value to him.
Sleight-of-hand, as applied to cards, has many variations. There is the "pass", in which two halves of a pack of cards are made to change quickly. There is the "change", in which one card is adroitly exchanged for another. An expert conjurer will also learn how to "force" a card. When the conjurer has acquired the art of inducing a member of the audience to take a particular card from a pack, the conjurer is said to have "forced" that card. Of course, the man who has drawn the card does not know that he has not made a free choice from the pack.
Then, again, the false shuffle is very useful. The conjurer who is making a false shuffle gives one the impression that he is mixing the cards up, but in reality he is keeping them in a certain order by means of sleight-of-hand. If I want a member of the audience to cut the cards at a certain place, I can generally be sure that the cards will be so cut if I "bridge" them beforehand. To "bridge" the cards I take two parts of the pack and bend the cards in opposite directions; then, when the two halves of the pack are put together
again, there is a little gap at the place at which I wish the person to cut the cards.
The "bridge" can also be used in another way. The performer takes a new pack of cards and allows a person to choose one. While the man is looking at it the performer bends all the rest of the pack sharply, so that every card in the pack is slightly curved. When the man who has selected a card replaces it in the pack, the performer can generally discover the chosen card, even after the pack has been moderately shuffled. All he has to do is to hold the cards rather loosely and pick out the one straight card from those with curved edges. It is obvious that the amateur conjurer who attempts to produce a coin, card, or other object from his hands alone sets himself a difficult task. When he makes use of some other object in his trick, his work is more simple.
For instance, he may take a small box, show it to be empty, close the lid, open it, and take out a live bird. That is a mechanical trick. The box has a false bottom, which flies up against the side of the box when a spring is pressed. The most useful method of performing a production trick is to employ some article which serves as a "cover" for the conjurer while he is secretly
producing the article he wants to show. The article may be concealed in some pocket, or about the conjuror's body. No particular arrangement of pockets is necessary; the conjurer should have such pockets as he finds from experience are most useful to him.
In doing a production trick the amateur should bear in mind that when he uses some object as a "cover" he must give some reasonable excuse for using it. He must not borrow a handkerchief in order that he may produce from it, say, half a dozen billiard balls. If he borrows a handkerchief he must perform some trick with it; if he merely wants a handkerchief as a "cover", it is better that he should produce one magically from his hands than that he should ask a
member of the audience to lend him one.
There are many different ways of concealing a handkerchief in the hands. It may be rolled up into a very small ball and palmed like a coin. A simple way of concealing it is to put it into a small flesh-coloured tin box, fastened either to the back or front of the hand by means of wax or a loop of thread. Here is an instance of sleight-of-hand being superseded by a simple contrivance; for an amateur will find that he can carry a handkerchief in a small box attached to his hand much more easily than he can palm the same handkerchief without such apparatus. The effect is the same in both cases.
At this point I fancy I can hear the beginner saying "Yes, that's all very well. You tell us that we are to have something concealed on us, and that we are to produce that thing under cover of something else; but how are we to do that without drawing attention to what we are doing?" My reply to that is that if you take care that every movement seen by the audience is made perfectly
naturally, you will not draw attention to what you are doing. It is a common mistake to suppose that "the quickness of the hand deceives the eye". You cannot move your hand so quickly that its passage cannot be followed by anyone who is watching you. It is not an easy matter to be natural--to pretend that you are doing a certain thing when you are really doing something
else--but that is what one must learn to do if one would become a conjurer. Let us suppose that we want to learn the goldfish trick--a very old trick, in which the performer produces a bowl of water with living goldfish from a cloth. The bowl is in either the breast or tail pocket of the performer's coat. The water and fish are kept in the bowl by an indiarubber top, like a lady's bathing-cap, which is taken off the bowl under cover of the cloth. If you would learn to do this trick thoroughly well, practise it without actually doing it. Wave the cloth about as though you were doing the trick, but give some reason for waving it. You may talk about the beautiful pattern of the cloth, or the effects of different lights on it; at any rate, let there be some excuse for waving the cloth about. Rehearse this part of the trick several times, and you will then discover for yourself at what particular moment you can best
introduce the bowl under the cloth. There are many little details in every trick, and these have to be carefully studied by the performer. For instance, in this trick it will be found that the indiarubber top bulges out, making the task of extracting the bowl from the pocket very difficult. To get the top quite flat lift up one little piece of the cover after it has been placed in position, and then squeeze out all the air. The indiarubber top will then be quite flat. When the performer gets the bowl into the cloth he must practise carefully how to get the cover off without any suspicious movement of the hands.
As good examples of the production tricks, I may mention the familiar trick of producing an endless number of articles from a hat, the trick of catching
money in the air, and the trick of the mysterious growth of flowers. One of the finest examples of a production trick was the beautiful creation of M. Bautier de Kolta, entitled "The Cocoon".
It was first produced at the Egyptian Hall, and has already been described in an earlier chapter.
The next class of effects includes all those tricks in which articles are made to disappear. In some respects these tricks are simply the reverse of those that have as their attraction a production of an article or articles. On the other hand, many of the tricks of disappearances are entirely different from those involving a production. There are innumerable ways of effecting the
disappearance of an article, and, as it is impossible to catalogue them all, I will describe only a few of the simplest methods.
The production of a bowl of water with fish in it has already been explained. To cause a bowl to disappear is as simple as to produce it. I will suppose that you have produced three bowls--one from each of your breastpockets, and one
from a pocket made underneath the tail of the coat. You have allowed the audience to see that two of the bowls are ordinary bowls, and so they will not suspect that the third bowl is a trick bowl, with a glass top fixed to it. This bowl has a small hole in the bottom, through which the water is poured, and through which dummy fish-made of pieces of carrot or red flannel-are passed. The hole is corked up, and the hand that produces the bowl conceals the cork. It will be obvious that this bowl, not having an indiarubber top, can be
produced and vanished more easily than the others. To cause its disappearance you have two shawls sewn together in such a way as to look like one shawl. Into the middle is sewn a disk of cardboard the exact size of the top of the bowl. When you are about to make the bowl disappear you throw the shawl over it and get the disk of cardboard over the top of the bowl. While you are thus occupied, and are engaging the attention of the audience with your patter, you can quietly put the bowl back into your pocket. It is an easy matter then to finish the trick in a very startling way. The audience will never suspect that the shawl does not conceal the bowl, because the cardboard disk will cause them to think that the bowl is still there; and when you suddenly wave the shawl away, they will gasp with astonishment--provided that you have not been nervous and have not dropped the bowl when you were slipping it into your pocket.
Here is a more complete way of vanishing the bowl. Pretend to put it on a table that has a small shelf at the back, or a table with a double top open at the back. The audience think that you are about to put the bowl on the table. You get near the table, and are about to put the bowl down, when you suddenly change your mind and come away from the table. It is perhaps hardly necessary for me to add that when you were near the table you lowered the bowl under cover of the shawl on to the shelf at the back of the table, or, if the table was made with a double top, in between the two, through an opening at the back. Having got rid of the bowl, it is an easy matter to make it disappear, and when you throw away the shawl with the cardboard disk in it the audience will be duly surprised.
Many objects can be made to disappear by means of trap tables. Some of these contrivances are very complicated, and the necessary "cover" can be afforded by the hands. If, for instance, you wish to make an orange disappear you put both hands round the orange and apparently pick it up. The hands were put there in order that the movement of the orange disappearing through the trap might be concealed.
A simple way of making a handkerchief disappear is to have a tin box as before described. Work the handkerchief into the box, slip it round to the back of the hand, and show the fronts of the hands empty. The box is fastened to the left hand by a small piece of flesh-coloured thread. The handkerchief is gradually worked into this box while your audience think that you are merely rolling it into a ball. The box is then slipped to the back of the hand, and the fronts of the hands can be shown empty, with the fingers wide apart.
There are numerous other ways of making a handkerchief disappear. One "vanisher"--to use the word understood by all conjurers--consists of a small tin cup. A piece of strong black elastic is attached to the closed end of the cup. The end of the elastic is passed through a small ring sewn at the bottom of the left armhole of the waistcoat. The elastic is then brought down to the bottom of the back of the waistcoat and passed through another small ring sewn there. It is then passed right round the waist, passed again through the ring at the back of the waistcoat, and finally brought to the front of the waistcoat and fastened on the top front button of the trousers. The cup should then be lying under the left armpit. When the performer wants to vanish a handkerchief he gets hold of the cup and draws it forward. He then pushes the handkerchief into the cup with one finger, but to the audience he seems to be simply working the handkerchief into his hands. While the performer is getting the handkerchief into the cup he makes an up-and-down movement of his hands, and when the whole handkerchief has been worked into the cup the hands are opened slightly at the side nearest to the performer. The cup, being released, then flies back to its position under the left arm. The performer should not show his arms empty at once, but should continue the movement of his hands in such a way that the audience gets the impression that the handkerchief has been rubbed away.
A handkerchief can be made to disappear by the simple act of rolling it up into a ball and palming it. To do this properly one must be proficient in
sleight-of-hand. It will now be seen that sleight-of-hand is only one way of getting the best effect, and not necessarily the best way or the easiest way. The amateur who wishes to succeed should thoroughly understand the headings under which all conjuring tricks can be classed. Let the amateur understand exactly all that a conjurer can do, and then let him take some object and try and discover some new way of performing a trick with it. As a slight encouragement to the amateur to do this, I will give particulars of a few methods by which an egg may be made to disappear.
First of all, the egg may be prepared by blowing it and then soaking it in