Professor Hoffmann

“ Now, being a ladies’ man, you will naturally have chosen one of the ladies of the pack, that is to say one of the queens, and your blush suggests that it was a red queen. Now there are only two red queens to choose from. The queen of hearts represents Love, and the queen of diamonds Money. ”

“ I don’t like bothering people to examine things, for in most cases it is a mere waste of time. But in this case I have a special reason for asking. There is something about this pack of cards and this die which I myself don’t understand; and I shall be much obliged to anyone who will help me to do so. As a matter of fact, these cards, though quite ordinary in other respects, are afflicted with a peculiar restlessness. They change places without notice and without any apparent reason. ”

“ Passing to the third function of patter, the misdirection of attention in the course of a trick, we will assume that you have made a start in the right direction at the outset, by suggesting some fanciful explanation of the effect you intend to produce, so that your audience, starting from wrong premises, do not know the points at which their too close observation would be inconvenient. The best way of diverting their attention at one of these critical points is obviously to attract it to some other direction. ”

“ Conjurers have a foolish fancy, as I dare say you have noticed, for borrowing other people’s hats. If a conjurer wants to collect money from the air, he collects it in a hat. If he wants to make an omelette, he cooks it in a hat. If he wants to hatch a few chickens, he does it in a hat. And, for fear of accidents, he never uses his own hat, but always borrows somebody else’s. It’s very wrong of us. As Sir William Gilbert says, about some other forms of crime,
‘It’s human nature, P’raps. ”

“ In the present case it has no doubt something to do with the experiment I want to show you. You chose your card quite freely, did you not, Madam? It never matters to me in the least what card is chosen, with the exception of one particular card, which is a holy terror. May I ask if you happened to draw the knave of clubs? Yes? I feared as much. The knave of clubs is the bane of my life. He is always endeavouring to get himself chosen, and then he does his best to upset my arrangements. And the worst of it is, he leads away the other three knaves. ”

“ I myself happen to have a very strong will, in fact, I don’t know anyone who has a stronger will, except my wife. I exert my will, and say, ‘first card, rise!’ and up it comes, as you see.”
Stepping well back from the spectators, so that they cannot distinguish from what part of the pack the card comes, he works up the hindmost card by the familiar “hand” method. (“Modern Magic,” p. 129.)
“Here we have one of the two cards. Let us see what it is. The five of diamonds! Good! And now for the other. Second card; rise! Up comes another card, you see, the deuce of diamonds. ”

“ The die is equally peculiar, but in another way. From some curious effect of sympathy it knows where a given card is to be found when I don’t know myself.
“The only possible explanation I can think of for their peculiarities is the fact that both cards and die were formerly the property of an old magician, and that after his death they were shut up together for some years in the same box with this wand, which also belonged to him, and that they have imbibed some of its magical qualities. ”

“ I think I can’t do better than use them to show you a little experiment in conjurer’s arithmetic. Will some young mathematician among the audience kindly tell us what two and five, added together, make?” (He waits for reply, but if none, pretends to hear one.) “Seven! Right first time. And if you take two from five how many remain? Three? Good again. Really [48] there are lot of clever people about, if you know where to look for them.
“Now I want to show you that the cards know all about it themselves; in fact, they are just as clever at doing sums as we are. ”

“ Bearing this in mind, describe what you propose to do as an “effect,” a “marvel,” an “experiment,” or a “phenomenon”; never by any chance as a “trick.”
It may be objected that I have myself repeatedly used the obnoxious word in the course of the foregoing pages, but that is another matter. This book is written by a conjurer for conjurers: and as between ourselves we are forced to admit, painful though it be to do so, that our greatest miracles are only tricks. But we need not tell the public so. Logically-minded, persons know it well enough, if they are allowed to think about the matter. ”

“ We hear people talk sometimes about the quickness of the hand deceiving the eye. I suppose such a thing must be possible, or nobody would have thought of it, but it seems to me that if it did anything of the kind, either the hand must be extra quick, or the eye extra slow. I know I should be afraid to attempt anything of that sort myself, but if you are a magician of the right sort you have no need to do so, for you can deceive the eye without [24] any quickness at all. I will prove it to you by means of these two cards which have been chosen. ”

“ To take an elementary example, let us suppose that the old-fashioned flat card-box, or some other appliance for magically producing a card, is loaded with, say, a seven of diamonds. The corresponding card is forced on one of the company, and taken back into the middle of the pack, on the top of the prepared card. The performer does not disturb or tamper with the pack in the smallest degree. He merely squares up the cards, and, pressing them well together, hands them to be shuffled, meanwhile calling attention to the card-box, which is shown apparently empty. ”

“ The trick is in truth a mere affair of dexterity; the performer having acquired by long practise the power of placing the pea under any thimble he pleases. What I propose to show you is a similar effect, but more surprising, because, as you will see, there is no room for dexterity, or indeed any form of trickery; so that I have to depend entirely upon my magic power. I shall use a shilling, as being more easily seen than a pea, and three cards from this pack to represent the thimbles. ”

“ An actor never tells his audience that he is an actor or that he is playing a part. He does not call their attention to his make-up, however excellent, or tell them that his wig comes from Clarkson. On the contrary, he does his best to make his audience for the time forget that he is Hubert de Barnstormer, or whatever his stage name may be, and to keep up the illusion [201] that he is actually the person whom he represents. ”

“ The explanations will naturally fall a good deal short of the George Washington standard of truthfulness, but the most tender conscience need not in such a case have any scruples on the score of veracity. No sane person expects truth in a fairy tale, and a magical entertainment, from beginning to end, is but a fairy tale in action. ”

“ Performer takes back the cards and proceeds to force the queen of diamonds on some member of the company (a lady for choice) . Leaving the drawn card for the time being in her hands, he asks a gentleman to shuffle and cut the rest of the pack and count off from the cut five indifferent cards. The card drawn by the lady is then shuffled with these, so that its position among the six shall be unknown. Performer, taking these from the holder, deals them in a row (or double row, as the case may be) upon the velvet mat, placing each exactly over one of the velvet-backed cards ”

“ The king of hearts has found out that his queen has gone off with the king of clubs, and has followed the queen post-haste. Here he is, you see.” (You plunge hand into flower-pot, and take out and exhibit the two drawn cards, and with them one of the two kings of hearts.) “It’s too bad, for as a matter of fact the queen of hearts doesn’t really care two-pence about the king of clubs. In fact she has even been known to call him a giddy old kipper. ”

“ No great work can be carried forward without organization, and the success of such bodies as The Magician’s Club and the Magic Circle here, and the Society of American Magicians over seas, has proved that magic is no exception to the rule. ”

“ Familiars are as extinct as the dodo. Perhaps it’s as well, but it makes it very much harder to be a magician. In the first place you must know all about astrology, anthropology, Egyptology and all the other ologies. You must be well posted in mathematics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and numismatics. You must know all about clairvoyance, palmistry and thought reading, sympathy and antipathy, magnetism, mesmerism, wireless telegraphy, X rays and all the other kinds of rays. ”

“ The idea of the black art mat is so completely a novelty that I have not found leisure to give it the full consideration [23] it deserves, and have probably far from exhausted its possibilities, but I offer by way of illustration the trick next following, which it seems to me would be rather effective, particularly as an introduction to some other card trick. We will call it
A MAGICAL TRANSPOSITION
Prepare two cards, say an eight of hearts and a seven of spades, by blackening all their edges save one of the narrow ends, [4] and backing each with velvet matching the mat. ”

“ Before we go any further, will the ladies who drew the cards say what they were,—I don’t mind asking you now, because they have passed out of my control. The queen of spades and the knave of hearts, you say? A fortunate choice, for the queen of spades and the knave of hearts happen to be particular friends, so I think we may now be sure of success. Now to establish the wireless wave, and I doubt not the queen of clubs and the knave of diamonds will speedily find them. (Make any appropriate gesture with wand.) ”

“ I often hear what people think. You are thinking that if you had said subtraction instead of addition, I should have been in what is popularly called a hole. But you are mistaken. Now we will ask the cards to do the subtraction [49] sum. The seven will go back to the pack, and send another card in its place.” He drops all three cards back into the flower-pot, and brings them up as before, save that this time the trick card is made to face the other way. “Five—less two—are three! Quod erat demonstrandum, as our old friend Euclid used to say when he had just floored a new poser. ”

“ That is the force called ‘Vril,’ described by Lord Lytton in his novel, ‘The Coming Race.’ He describes Vril as a sort of hyper-electricity capable in the hands of those who know how to gather and use it, of producing all sorts of wonders, even to removing mountains. Imprisoned in a wand and directed by a strong will, it will shrivel up an enemy or a wild beast as by a flash of lighting. ”

“ The modern magician should do the same. If he has enough of the true artistic spirit to imagine, when he steps forward on the platform, that he is a magician, and that his miracles are genuine, he will go a long way towards producing a like impression in the minds of his audience. ”

“ Every conjurer who has in him, as all conjurers should have, the creative instinct of the artist, and aims therefore at putting something of himself into his work, must of necessity be to some small extent an amateur mechanic. ”

“ Happily there is no connection between conjuring and crime, beyond the fact that they both begin with a C. No conjurer that I know of has ever murdered anybody or been murdered himself, and when a conjurer borrows a half-crown, he always—well, almost always returns it. ”

“ If, in the case of a given trick, the performer is absolutely at a loss to produce a satisfactory fable to introduce it, he may evade the difficulty by stating that he is about to produce an effect for which he cannot himself account, and inviting the assistance of his audience in doing so.
The second function of patter is the calling of the attention of the audience to matters which you desire them to take note of, and to give opportunity to do so. ”

“ As the “click” in some cases adds much to the effect of a trick, and as it may to some readers be an unfamiliar sleight, I may pause to explain that it is executed as follows: Take the pack in either hand, held upright between forefinger and thumb, a little more than halfway down, with the middle finger curled up behind it as in Fig. 13. With the tip of the third finger bend back the extreme bottom corners of the last half dozen or so of the cards, allowing them to escape again smartly. The sound made by the corners in springing back again constitutes the “click.” ”

“ It is surprising, in conjuring matters, how much even the smallest percentage of fact increases the power of the average spectator for swallowing fiction. The patter for the trick which follows has been arranged upon these lines.
The requisites for the trick are a pack of cards from which three known cards have been withdrawn and palmed (or so placed to be in instant readiness for palming) , a hand-mirror, and a silk handkerchief. ”

“ Here was a wizard indeed!
In arranging your patter, be humorous if you can, but if, like the gentleman we have all heard of, you “joke with difficulty,” don’t force yourself to be funny. That it is possible for a man lacking humour still to be a great conjurer is proved by the case of Hartz, who was notably deficient in this particular, but by his excellence in other directions won a place in the very first rank of his profession. But if you cannot be humorous, at any rate be [199] cheerful. Geniality of manner is one of the most valuable assets of the conjurer. ”

“ Which treatment is likely to give the greater satisfaction to his audience, he must decide for himself.
Where the performer has the gift (for a “gift” it undoubtedly is) of devising effective patter for himself I am strongly in favour of his doing so. Borrowed patter may be likened to a borrowed dress-coat. It is never likely to be an exact fit, and [194] a “giant’s robe upon a dwarfish thief,” or the reverse, cannot be expected to be a becoming garment. Every man has, or should have, a style of his own, and it is rarely good policy to imitate that of somebody else. ”