[From the preface]
Look, if you wanted to buy a book full of tricks, there are countless titles to choose from. They’ll be called things like “Magic Anyone Can Do” and “1001 Tricks to bore the shit out of people”. Get onto Amazon. Go mad. The book you have just wisely purchased is concerned with much more serious stuff…
This book is not a collection of tricks that everyone can do. It does have some very strong magical effects throughout its pages that will at some point soon make people think you have super-human powers, but they are incidental. Being a close-up magician has nothing to do with being able to mumble through a couple of self-working card tricks, Granddad-style. This book is a training course. It will train you to become a competent magician, not only in terms of secret knowledge, but also in regard to magical and manual dexterity. Not only will you understand the psychological tools of the trade, you will also learn to humour me when I go off on tangents, and get used to me being a little condescending and sometimes downright insulting...
[On wands]
Yes, magicians really use wands. Many laypeople are quite surprised to know this, imagining them to be almost joke props, but that isn’t the case at all. Having seen and read too much Harry Potter, many novice magicians seek out ornate turned wands made of exotic woods, spending hundreds in some cases. My own beloved wand is a 25cm rod of purest Chinese plastic. Hollow and black as night, it is tipped at each end with a white plastic insert. It cost me a pound...
[On Card Fans]
Fans are very attractive spreads of cards, usually held in the performer’s hands. Magic that pertains to fans is commonly called ‘Fanny Magic’. Extended routines with displays of fans are often called ‘Fannying‘ and you may well hear phrases like ‘Stop Fannying about with the cards and show us some magic, you ponce!’ Fanning has its place but try to keep it short and sweet, and if your performing style allows it, be nonchalant about the fans. Here's how to do a couple of the most impressive...
[On the Classic Pass]
I would ask you to notice the size of the book you hold in your hand. Sure, it’s a substantial enough volume to more than justify the very reasonable purchase price, but it is at least small and light enough to be carried by a single person and has a tree-to-book ratio of something less than one. This would not be the case if I was to attempt to include a literary review of the classic pass. Every magician since the dawn of time has had something to say about the classic pass. Despite this, many magicians go their whole careers without mastering it. In my weighty opinion the classic pass is the single most powerful sleight in card magic. I may have said that about double lifts earlier. That just goes to demonstrate that this diatribe was scribbled in more than one drunken rant. Never-the-less, it is nothing like as difficult as some magical elders/bores would have you believe. I will first describe what the classic pass is, then why you need it, followed by what you need to do to achieve it, and at last I will outline the training necessary to acquire it as part of your magical repertoire...
Little snippets excised from the meat of the Magic Bollocks book, a work in progress. I will try to give a flavour of the thing without giving away any magical secrets.
