In 2003, Luke Jermay invited Caleb Strange to write a book: nearly four years in the making, The Garden of the Strange is the brilliant result.
This beautifully written, deeply affecting book takes Mr. Strange’s trademark blend of innovative thinking and stunning presentations to the next level. With twenty compelling and original routines, and an additional half-dozen ‘from your pocket’ variations, this eagerly awaited work will be of great use and interest to mentalists, bizarrists, and table-hoppers alike.
Yet beyond its fine, audience-centred effects, The Garden of the Strange contains something more, of equal value to the working performer. For tucked away within its full and thorough notes, the attentive reader will find explained a wide range of powerful yet often neglected techniques (linguistic, literary, theatrical), which can be used to maximise the impact and enhance the quality of one’s work.
The Garden of the Strange, then, is a thrilling and, above all, fresh exploration of the art of the impossible: a lyrical and accomplished volume, it has been called, more than once, ‘the most inspiring book of magic I have yet read’.
We are expecting to receive the book early May and expect the demand to be high, so to avoid disappointment pre-order your now!
Beautiful Hard backed edition with dust jacket only £24.99
Click Here For Contents
History of Cheating
Cheating in the Cardrooms
The Industry Evolves
Professionals and Amateur Cheaters
Elements of the Scam
Cheater's Psychology
Signals
Crooked Gambling Equiptment
Suckers
Collusion
False Shuffles and Related Scams
Holding Out
Peeks, False Deals, and Coolers
Marked Cards
Online Poker
Tournaments
Poker's Line of Defense
Game Procedures
Detection Skills
Identifying the Crooked Game
Protecting Yourself
The Future of Poker
Pages 360 - Hard Bound
Darwin has earned a reputation for creating some of the strongest card effects in modern magic. In Designing Miracles, he reveals for the first time the principles and techniques that he follows in doing so. These insights will help you choose stronger effects, create stronger effects, and strengthen those effects that you've already performing.
If you've ever been puzzled by an audience's reaction or lack of it, this book will dispel the mystery. It gives you a new set of tools for understanding how magic works, why it sometimes doesn't, and how to make it work better. Never again will you be at a loss as to why an effect isn't playing well. Never again will you be at a loss as to what to do about it.
If your goal is to provide your audiences with an unforgettable experience of impossibility, you'll find Designing Miracles filled with insights to help you do so. It will teach you how to use the audience's own thinking patterns against them. It will show you how to turn puzzles into miracles. It will do something that few magic books can: change with way you think about magic.
Pages 200 - Hardcover
From the author of Card College, the world's most acclaimed course on sleight-of-hand card magic, comes Card College Light, Roberto Giobbi's first text focused entirely on professional caliber card tricks requiring no manipulative skill.
For whom is this book intended?
It is for beginners, of course—but by no means in total. This book is intended for everyone who has always wanted to perform card tricks, but who didn't have the time necessary to learn complex routines, or the years necessary to master difficult techniques. So, yes, this book is certainly meant for beginners.
However, it is also directed at those who are already proficient in the craft. Card College Light is in a class apart from other books that focus on sleightless card tricks. When it comes to artistic considerations—interpretation, staging, communication and psychology—other books seldom even recognize such concepts. Card College Light strives to remain as simple as possible, yet to identify concepts and to open doors that put sleightless tricks into the context of artistic and utterly baffling card magic. Although other books consider the same type of material, their approaches to it are quite different from Giobbi's.
Most of the tricks taught are from Mr. Giobbi's active professional repertoire, with which he baffles the public and magicians, too. Every trick can be done with any deck of cards of average quality, and many can be done under all performance conditions, with a borrowed deck and no preparation. With these sleightless tricks, you can easily acquire a reputation as a magician who can really make magic.
When It Comes to Great Card Magic There Is More to the Secret Than Just the Secret!
Countless books on card magic promise tricks that "require no skill" and are "easy to do" or "self-working". They expose the method behind the tricks, but they fail to explain how the tricks are made genuinely amazing. Card tricks that allow the fingers to remain idle require that their methods be cunningly protected through presentation and psychology, which in turn amplify the feeling of real magic. Without these things, all you are left with are mere puzzles.
Giobbi brings his widely respected talents as both teacher and full-time performer to bear on tricks he has selected from time-tested classics and little-known modern miracles by world masters, taught with a thoroughness that includes psychology, presentations, scripts and invaluable performance tips.
21 Tricks - 7 full routines!
Giobbi has also organized these tricks into powerful routines, which teach the reader how organization and combination can be used to make good tricks even more inextricably baffling. These lessons serve not only the beginner, but also the advanced card-magician who wishes from time to time to include a trick wherein the audience can stare relentlessly at the fingers without discovering a thing.
Pages 170 - Hardcover
Canadian mentalist Christopher Taylor’s new book, Unconventional, follows in the path of his highly praised first book, Inside Out. In the new book you will encounter more of the practical ideas for which Taylor is becoming known. Here you’ll find a means for determining a spectator’s mentally selected card, ala Vernon’s classic Out of Sight, Out of Mind. It’s even more effective when done with two spectators! Taylor also explores how to use the Classic Force with non-card objects, extensions of secret writing and pocket writing, a new routine for the pocket press (one of the most popular routines from his first book), and uses for the commercial effect Ghost Glass. Several of the routines use Runes, for which Taylor gives many presentational ideas.
Pages 89 - Soft Bound
