Exclusive Magical Secrets

I bought a weird book at a garage sale today, "Exclusive Magical Secrets" by Will Goldston.

It says on the copyright page that it was Copyright 1980 by Coles Publishing Co. of Canada. Maybe the copyright laws are different in Canada, but this book was obviously a reprint of something much older. The artwork and typography make it look at least 70 years old.

Since then I've looked it up and I believe it said it was published in 1912. So it's coming up on being 100 years old. The original book of course.

At ABEbooks.com they have some in the thousands of dollars range, like for an early edition. So if I'm going to have a copy, this looks like one to have.

I leafed through it and read about a few tricks. It has great little cartoon pictures, diagrams, schematics of magicians' equipment, the whole set up for particularly complex tricks. Page 422 and following as an example, shows a disappearing piano trick. There's a piano that must be a fake piano. Once the curtain comes over it, the person sitting at the piano folds up the piano and it becomes the platform, with the whole thing folded down to make nothing but a floor! Then it shows her, the lovely assistant, walking a plank out the back so she won't be there when the curtain's lifted.

Wow, what a trick that'd be! Complex as far as I'm concerned!

The book is just over 500 pages long and tons of tricks. I'm not going to be trying any of them, because the set up on the ones I looked at looks extensive to say the least.