Stats for nerds
3recommend
5mentions
5people
2015–2019years
60% recommend40% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Card College is the gold standard for card magic. Several volumes. Very clear illustrations. Pricey. There is also a DVD with the book's text and videos.
The Royal Road to Card Magic is much shorter, much cheaper, and also a classic.
- I started learning myself in late November 2017. You can get a LOT of mileage off a $10ish book too (eg “expert card technique” or “royal road to card magic”[1])
But yes, I follow a few YouTube channels that have taught me a lot: Xavier Spade, Alex Pandrea, PigCake and a few others. There are some excellent ones, but I noticed that you do have to be careful, there's a lot of "reveals" or "tutorials" that are done by hobbyists and their quality is varied, some would teach bad handling or bad habits. They can be fine to get the concept, but maybe not as an absolute beginner. The ones done by magicians who perform professionally tend to be great quality though. But you probably know this better than I, since it sounds like you've been doing it longer :)
Its really easy to find tutorials and guides nowadays, you just gotta put the time in!
I personally don’t actually like the double lift because I find that 90% of them, even though they are perfectly executed, just don’t look natural — most laypeople simply would never turn cards over in the way most magicians do and it just looks fishy. Having said that, most laypeople don’t actually notice (it’s ibcredible what you can get away with sometimes!) but I notice it and it puts me off :)
[1] A side story on this book... I may have cost the publisher a bit of money... They have a "video edition" of the book, where many of the techniques and routines have a QR code linking to a video, but when I got it, all of the links were broken. So I complained to the Advertising Standards Authority (UK) and about two months later, all of the QR codes started working. I noticed that they all directly linked to Rackspace CDN URLs (ie not to their own domain). I can't imagine it was fun or cheap to get the exact same identical URLs working again...
- Card College by Roberto Giobbi is pricey but provides excellent instruction. If you don't mind reading older, more formal language (though not as old as Erdnase!), The Royal Road to Card Magic by Hugard and Braue, and its sequel Expert Card Technique, cover more material than Giobbi at a fraction of the cost, albeit with slightly less attention to the subtleties of finger position.
- I also began as an amateur magician but mostly remained there. Never did more than a few impromptu shows for friends and family.
Often, I compare magic to programming. It’s all about the “effect” and wowing people with something they did not believe possible. But software, as with a trick, loses its effect once you see it the second time. And, once you get into the details of how the sausage is made, it’s technical, time-consuming and probably not worth it for most people who just enjoy the effect.
There’s a book “The Royal Road to Card Magic” and there’s a line there which says (paraphrasing) “there is much joy in being the deceiver as there is in being deceived” - perhaps that’s where the joy is to be found, as at the other side of that transaction rather than “enjoying being deceived”?
- As a note, too, R. Paul Wilson did a rather decent DVD series of The Royal Road to Card Magic, which you can get for ~$60. The book is a useful reference, but actually -seeing- the sleights can be amazingly useful.
And as others have mentioned, if you do go to Erdnase (or get sufficiently hooked to just want a copy), there is both the Annotated Erdnase by Darwin Ortiz (which is pretty readily available), as well as Dai Vernon's Revelation book (not to be confused with the 'Revelations' series of DVDs), his own annotations on Erdnase ( http://www.mcmagicwords.com/books_revelation.html ).
