I just came across a really nice book, entitled Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative by Edward Tufte, which has a great chapter praising magic books, pamphlets, and other ephemera for providing clear illustrations of complex phenomena.
The chapter is called 'Explaining Magic: Pictorial Instructions and Disinformation Design' and it was co-authored with Jamy Ian Swiss (one of us).
It has good examples from Royal Road to Card Magic (Hugard and Braue), Coin Manipulation (Bobo), Coinmagic (Kaufman), The Complete Works of Derek Dingle (Kaufman), among others.
He is impressed with the way in which multiple layers of the material world can be depicted in two-dimensional space. He compares the magical illustrations to others from science, philosophy, architecture, etc.
Disinformation design refers to how we as magicians base our effects on 'techniques that deny, conceal, obscure, and manipulate optical information' (Tufte 1997: 64).
He also good tips on supressing context (don't tell your audience what you are going to do) and preventing reflective analysis (don't repeat a trick to the same audience).
Wasn't sure where to post this, but I recommend it for more on the history and importance of our craft
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