talkmagic.co.uk

Full title: "Magic in Theory, an introduction to the theoretical and psychological elements of conjuring" (Phew!)

Price - I can't remember - about £8 I think.

I bought this book because I tend to take quite a theoretical approach to everything I do. I found it very interesting but it won't suit everyone's taste.

The authors are both professional academics in the area of Psychology, who also do magic as a hobby. The book does NOT teach tricks or sleights etc. It is about how people's minds work & how misdirection exploits this.

I picked up a number of useful ideas. Here are a few below. If these ideas are either (1) new to you or (2) the kind of stuff that interests you, then you might want to buy the book.

When you do a magic trick, you are in a sense telling the spectator a 'story' about what is happening whilst in fact you are doing something else. You give them clues and they fill in the rest. You can use 'convincers' to imply something without actually saying it. If you state something explicitly you arouse suspicion. They call this 'over-proving'. An example (mine not theirs) would be that you imply a box is empty by casually tipping it upside down (maybe accidentally on purpose). You do NOT say "here is a perfectly normal empty box".

The spectator will generally accept that a trick starts & ends when YOU say so. This puts a mental 'frame' around a trick - but you can be doing stuff outside that frame.

The trick continues long after you are finished. The spectator will attempt to reconstruct what happened. Often their memory of the details is very poor. You can manipulate this to 'cover your tracks'

A lot of magicians will already know all this from experience. As I have said, these authors are taking a much more theoretical approach. Some of you will love this. Some will be bored to death. Only buy it if you know this is the kind of thing that turns you on!

Thanks for the heads-up on this one... looks very interesting indeed. As soon as I've finished Nelms' "Magic and Showmanship for Conjuring" for the third time, I think I'll be buying this one.

Psychologists and magicians must have a lot to learn from each other - in a similar vein to magicians and actors. I find it fascinating when moving away from the 'sleight' side of things in magic and concentrating on the theory of dealing with people.

Can you tell me: is this just interesting theory, or are there real practical points which will change the way you present routines?

I've just bought his book and am presently reading the chapter on misdirection. This chapter alone is worth the price of the book, which was about a fiver.

Yes, the book is fool of common sense, and there is yet another taxonomy of effects; vanish, appear, etc, but it really is a nice summary of a lot of people's work.

The chapter on misdirection is presented as a framework. I'm sure it doesn't go into as much detail about as many others, but it's given me an enormous amount to think about and since it's been written like an academic paper, it's well referenced and has a good bibliography.

I would definitely put this in the list of books worth reading about magic, which presently includes Magic and Showmanship, Our Magic, Strong Magic and Absolute Magic.