Dunninger's Complete Encyclopedia of Magic

• Dunninger's Complete Encyclopedia of Magic

ca. 22 x 29 cm, 288 S., Spring Books, London, New York, Sydney, Toronto, 1967, gebunden

Books like Dunninger's Complete Encyclopedia of Magic are hard to find. The reason is clear enough: it isn't every day that a great conjuror - or magician, as he prefers to be calles - tells the world his secrets, and Joseph Dunninger is one of the most remarkable exponents of his art. So this book, up till now only available at much higher price, is a rarity in a still underpublished field. Dunninger is oner of the last of the great magicians, the performers of live vaudevilleand theatre whose spectacular effects and impenetrable illusions have mystified and delighted countless millions of people. In more than fifty years as a magician he amassed an unparalleled fund of experience and knowledge, the fruit of which is this extraordinary book. The man is fascinating as his work: a product of the age of Barnum and Baily, of vaudevill, burlesque and music hall, he is an outrageous, unabashed showman; his life is dedicated to impressing friends, audiences the Prince of Wales, the world; and his encyclopedia very definitely bears the impress of his personality. But more than that he is an original, an inventor of innumerable devices ranging from the elegantly simple to those involving machinery and preperation of enormous ingenuity and complexity. Many of his illusions are revealed for the first time in these pages, along with those of many famous magicians including the great Houdini who never revealed any of his tricks in his lifetime. The tricks and illusions described in this encyclopedia are so various, in both their kind and their degree of complexity, that everyone from the most expert conjuror to the beginner will find a great number to suit his special interest and ability. Here are sleight-of-hand tricks, mystic jugglery, telepathy stunts, spirit writing, card tricks, the production and disappearance of every imaginable sort of object, and even scientific effects. We have not counted the marvelous mystific illusions in Dunninger's Complete Encyclopedia, but they run into thousands, all fully and clearly explained, and illustrated with many hundreds of specially-prepared line-drawings.