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I was hoping someone on here may be able to help me. I am a television researcher working on the BBC show 'Balderdash and Piffle'. This show looks at the history of some of the words in the Oxford English Dictionary. One of the words we are looking at this year is 'mucky pup'. We have received a lot of e-mails saying that Ellidson's catalogues advertised 'mucky pups' as fake dog turds. I was hoping that someone might have an old copy of Ellidson's catalogue which advertised a 'mucky pup'. The earlier the better as with each word we are actually trying to change the dictionary and push back the earliest verified usage of the word.
Any help or information will be greatly appreciated.

Best chap to talk to is Allen Tipton - PM him or e-mail, he's been working very closely with the Ellisdon descendants and has a lot of information and old catalogues to refer to. Previous threads on this topic are at http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/ftopic6188.p ... =ellisdons ,
http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/ftopic2114.p ... =ellisdons and
http://www.talkmagic.co.uk/ftopic10317. ... =ellisdons

Hope it helps, please let us know how you get on with this project as Ellisdons is an icon from the younger years of several TM members !

I remember them well. I visited their first and second shops before they went mail order only, and I still have their linking rings and a few other bits.

Sorry, I don't have a catalogue though...

Barry

I certainly remember fake dog turds being branded as 'mucky pups', but I don't know what came first - the product name or the general expression.

And that makes me no help whatsoever.

Cheers,

Pete

Alan Tipton has copies of some catalogue pages and Mucky Pup is shown on one of them. Sorted !

I used to love Ellisdons. I still remember the thrill when I got my first copy of the Royal Road to Card Magic from there by mail order and it changed my whole outlook on magic. I had been making limited progress up until then. However when I got that book within 6 months I was pretty hot stuff and the reactions I was getting from laymen went from so-so to superb. To this day 50% of my close up card repertoire comes from that book. I don't need much else.

I used to go in my lunch hour from school to Ellisdons magic counter to watch Jon Tremaine work when he was in their employ. I had been doing magic for two years and had never met a magician. He was the first one I watched live and he did a lot of magic in there that Ellisdons didn't sell. I expect he did it to liven up his day. I remember thinking that he was a very good close up magician. He did something that I don't think he has ever tipped fully to this day. The best 3 card monte rotuine I have ever seen.

He gave a snippet of it away in one of his books for beginners but not the whole thing. It involved a DF card.

Yes. Ellisdon's holds a lot of memories for me. They had the biggest joke shop I had ever seen. There were several floors.

My father had a magic book from Ellisdons. It was a fairly thick tome with a harback yellow cover. I learned my first magic trick from it, the four jacks robbing a house. Dad is 82 now so he probably had the book somewhere in the 1930s. Neither of us can remember what happened to it over the years which in light of my interest in magic now is rather sad.

Fantastic shop though, was taken there several times in the late 50s, early 60s.