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Alan Jackson wrote:I've just found out that you can see the contents of Seventh Heaven here:
http://www.hutch.demon.co.uk/lewis/contents.htm
and order it from here:
http://www.hutch.demon.co.uk/lewis/index.htm
Here are my views on the book.
Beautifully produced with very clear descriptions and photographs. I particularly like the conversational style and immaculate use of language (and apostrophes), and the amusingly apposite titles. The thing that struck me most of all was the huge variety of the effects, and I like the way they are grouped into categories. I found it very useful that several of the effects were improvements to existing ones. I can think of four examples (two from back issues of Apocalypse) where I had been attracted to an effect but thought that the original method was sufficiently cumbersome or illogical to make it impracticable: the improvements in Seventh Heaven now mean that they are workable and that I will be able to perform them.
It’s impossible to pick even half-a-dozen favourites. But in no particular order these are few that stick in my mind as being notably ingenious or funny or both. Dialexis (and Types Crypt). It was crazy to imagine that it would be possible to determine a thought-of word from a book you hadn’t seen before and don’t ever touch. It was even crazier to devise a way of doing it. Venus Observed: what a bizarre but happy correspondence of subsets. Graffito: another attraction of Greek e’s. The Fisher King is a worth-the price-of-the-book principle for a mindreader. Curry for Three: wonderful idea. Demolition Derby: great! I have always liked the thinking behind the think-of-a-number stunt in Martin Gardner’s MMM, but found that some people struggled with the arithmetic and that others were so numerate that the fractions and negative numbers did not evoke the requisite level of uncertainty, but the card game where the cards are effectively analogues for numbers is a genuine stoke of genius (I’m still smiling at the red/black faceup/facedown thing at the start: it’s just so cheeky). And Practical Joker, Mint Sauce, Thimble, Philadelphia Hamlet, and Tomb of the Four Kings and so on …
I think that anyone with an interest in close-up magic would find enough material which they could add to their working repertoire to make the book worth several times the purchase price.
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