Merchant of Magic, Author at How to do Magic Tricks

A Magic Secret Disappointment?

By Greg Chapman

I’ll be honest, this may seem to be a strange choice of topic to choose when I have been very kindly asked if I would write a post for the ‘Merchant of Magic’ blog, especially as a first blog post, however, I want to talk to you about the most disappointing moment involved in buying magic tricks and effects, and especially when buying them online.

I do think that this is an important subject and one which isn’t discussed enough, and I certainly wish that I had understood it when I started my career in magic.

What is this magic secret disappointment of which I speak?

I think that most of us have at some point (and for most of us, many, many times), seen a trailer, or read a description of an effect and been absolutely blown away. We have immediately rushed to our favourite magic dealer’s website and placed an order – and it always feels to me a little like writing a letter to Santa!

Then the waiting begins. Again, like a child waiting for Christmas (or, if I’m going to be completely honest throughout this post, like me waiting for Christmas), it seems to take forever. Although it may only take 48 hours for that package to reach us, it seems like weeks as we login to our accounts over and over again to check the order status.

Excitement builds as it tells us that the order has been dispatched. If it is a tracked order we then start checking and rechecking the tracking website until suddenly we find out that the delivery will be the next morning. A vague time is given, and we get ready to wait within earshot of the doorbell between 8.54 and 12.54 the next morning lest we miss the delivery and (horror of horrors!) have to wait another two days for the delivery to be attempted again.

Finally, our mail carrier arrives with the post, and there it is, a parcel containing this great effect which we have been thinking about for days. We have been desperately awaiting the moment when we can discover the ‘magic secret’ behind this effect, and we can begin to learn the trick. We are prepared to take time, to put in the ‘hard graft’ to ‘practice, practice, practice’ until we can finally perform this trick ourselves.

Then, we open the package, we look inside the box (obviously we would never touch any of the items inside the box before we read/watch the instructions carefully!), and we finally learn the secret.

At that moment, so often, especially early in my magic career, I felt like the audience watching the ‘sucker die box’ routine, when the doors are finally opened to reveal that the die has vanished, and all of their suspicions of it sliding backwards and forwards have been proved wrong. In the trick, this moment (if performed properly) is immediately replaced by the moment that the die is revealed elsewhere, and a moment of magical joy can leap to the forefront, the disappointment of the empty box completely forgotten.

This moment is lost after we learn the magic secret of an effect.

Jim Steinmeyer wrote:

“Magicians guard an empty safe. In fact, there are few secrets that they possess that are beyond the capacity of a high-school science class, little more complex than a rubber band, a square of mirrored glass or a length of thread. When an audience learns how it’s done, they quickly dismiss the art: ‘Is that all there is?’”

While on occasion the method presented by a trick may be so beautiful we have to suppress the urge to share it with the world, the fact of the matter is that on many occasions when the trick is revealed to us, it is as disappointing as it would be to an audience member. This great secret we have been puzzling over is nothing more than a simple gimmick, or a simple ruse.

The worst part of it is, now we know the secret, it suddenly seems so obvious.

Especially when we are starting out in magic (although I still feel this sometimes), once we know the method to a trick, even a trick we haven’t been able to figure out for ourselves having seen it a couple of times, we can so easily allow ourselves to think that because the method seems obvious once we know it, that it will also be obvious to our audience.

“This will never work in the real world,” we tell ourselves. “People will see right through it.”

This is when we hear of tricks being placed into a drawer and forgotten about – I have done it myself in my early days in magic. I have bought tricks and not performed them for many years, not because of how difficult they were, but because of how easy they were.

This all changed for me about a year into my magic career when I purchased an effect which changed everything for me – White Star by Jim Critchlow.

For those who haven’t seen this effect, it is a beautifully designed and thought-out ‘living/dead’ style routine, all based around the story of the sinking of the Titanic. It is a wonderful effect and (spoiler alert) would go on to become one of my most performed pieces for over a decade, and one which I still regularly perform today.

Going back to the moment when I first discovered the magic secret of ‘White Star’, I was beyond disappointed. I felt that I had wasted my money, which at that stage, at the start of my career, hurt really badly. I had bought the effect for a particular show which I was going to tour that summer, and I couldn’t afford to buy another trick to replace it with (this was, of course, also before I realised the wealth of tricks waiting in magic books!). I really didn’t have a choice, I was going to have to practice, and try it in the show, and hope that the audience would enjoy it and it would fool some of them.

I performed the trick for the first time – the entertainment factor was high, and during the show, it seemed to go down really well. As I was performing it on stage rather than in close up, it was still difficult to know whether the audience in their seats had actually been fooled.

At the end of the show, as I always do with stage performances, I made myself available to meet the audience, and was surprised, delighted, and a little bit disconcerted when more than one person came up to me and asked me about the ‘experiment with the Titanic photographs’. Did I believe that there was some sort of spirit in the air, or did I think that people were picking something up from the photographs themselves? This was, I should point out, in a show which also involved a mentalism trick where the discovery of a number was made by cutting the head off of a plasticine model of Charles I, and included my comedy routine ‘The Battle Of Hastings – as told through the medium of interpretive dance’. Yet this trick, which I had almost abandoned, had fooled the audience to the extent that some of them weren’t even looking for a trick, but rather some paranormal explanation!

From then on, whenever I perform that trick, I feel morally obliged afterwards to remind people that I am a magician, just to make it clear that no ‘ghostly forces’ are in play.

Thus I learned a truly valuable magic secret – just because a trick seems simple once you know its magic secret, It doesn’t mean it’s easy to figure out. Especially when you add all of the skills of performance, the design of your routine, and the words you use around it. Even the simplest, most obvious seeming trick can become a miracle if properly presented, so before you put that trick in a drawer after that initial look inside the box, remind yourself how the box looks from the outside!

Earlier on I quoted the great Jim Steinmeyer, talking about magicians guarding an empty safe.

When opening a new magic trick, and looking inside that ‘empty safe’, however, I suggest remembering the second half of that quote:

“The real art is how the rubber band is handled with the finesse of a jewel cutter, how a mirror is used or concealed precisely, how a masterful performer can hint at impossibilities that are consummated with only a piece of thread.”

I don’t know what magic secrets exposure means anymore

by Merchant of Magic Leave a Comment

By Paul Osborne

Exposure. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? When I was a lad [picture me walking up a hill carrying a bread loaf while Dvorak’s New World Symphony is playing – now there’s a reference for the teenagers] magic secrets exposure was an easy concept to understand. From my very first magic book – How to be a Conjurer by Robert Harbin – the rules of magic were clearly laid out: Never tell anyone how a trick is done, the author wrote.

However, even in those dark days before the internet, the waters were sometimes muddied. I remember Paul Daniels being criticised for including tricks such as the Chinese Linking Rings and the Rice Bowls in his magic sets, with some magicians saying that Paul was exposing these classics of magic to children.
And then, a few years later, those “bad boys of magic”, Penn and Teller, crashed onto the scene. Most of you will have noticed, in my opening line, the nod to Teller’s sublime smoking routine where classic sleight-of-hand moves are explained to the viewing audience. As a teenager, watching their first TV special, I thought, “well, this will annoy a lot of magicians, but, what the hell. I love it.”

Teller has often spoken about the duo’s approach to exposure: that most of their audience probably had a magic set as a child, that most people know what a “palm” is, and that, sometimes, a routine can still blow your mind even if you’re in on it. Check out their version of the cups and balls using clear plastic cups for proof of this. (Dai Vernon witnessed them perform this effect live and laughed his head off, according to Teller; The Professor ‘getting’ what they were doing.)

Today, social media is awash with magicians and hobbyists performing tricks and then exposing the method, and many have been criticised for doing so. But I think the argument is more nuanced than it seems.

Mentalist Spidey, who puts out many magic tutorial videos on YouTube, addressed some of his critics on the Magicians Talking Magic podcast. He said: “There’s a difference between magic secrets exposure and teaching magic. I see a lot of YouTube videos with a child who learned a trick last week, barely knows how to hold the cards, and is exposing the secret to the trick. And I don’t like that.

“I teach magic. Everything on my channel is either something I created, or something I adapted, or something that’s so old-as-the-hills that nobody could claim ownership to it. My videos, on average, are 14 to 18 minutes, and you’re learning one trick. And by the time you get to the tutorial, we’re about eight or nine minutes into the video. My average view is six to seven minutes. So most people have left the video before I even get to the secret.

“It’s all by design. It starts with me talking about the trick, then I do the performance, then I talk about the history of the trick, and then we go into the tutorial which is taught slowly and effectively. I want real students, not someone who is looking for a quick secret.”

The flipside of a tutorial though is the video that’s designed for entertainment by magic secrets exposure. One famous YouTube magician was brutally criticised by Craig Petty on his Magic TV channel for exposing illusion bases, a principle that many stage performers use in their shows.

I think most of us can agree that giving away secrets that aren’t yours is wrong. If Murphy’s Magic brings out a new product from a particular creator, and then someone immediately reveals the method on YouTube, that’s not right – and they should be called out. But for tricks that are many years old and not owned by anyone? This is where I get confused. Is a wannabe magician seeking out the Three-Card Monte trick on YouTube any different to someone visiting a library and reading the trick’s secret in a magic book? OK, for the former, you don’t have to physically leave your chair but you still have to invest time in searching for it online.

So maybe the ‘what does exposure mean?’ answer lies in how much time and effort it takes to discover that secret. A wannabe-magician spending 20 minutes watching a Spidey video, listening to his explanations and watching a performance, is very different to a layman channel surfing, coming across a repeat of the Masked Magician on the TV show Breaking The Magician’s Code and being spoon-fed classic secrets used by working magicians.

And talking of Three-Card Monte, in 1994 John Lenahan became the first magician in 85 years to be thrown out of The Magic Circle after explaining the sleight-of-hand used in the trick on the BBC show How Do They Do That? His website’s bio states: “The trick is no more than a gambling con, but I took the rap and enjoyed the publicity.” And today, happily, he’s now a Circle member again.

I contacted The Magic Circle to find out the club’s current position on magicians who give away secrets on YouTube, and also whether Vegas legends Penn and Teller would, today, be allowed to join the club.
President Megan Swann said: ”We have a committee which considers each case individually. It is complicated and often depends on the intent of the magician and what the trick is. Generally, it’s safer to avoid YouTube exposure videos though, as it’s hard to control who sees them.
“As to whether Penn and Teller would be allowed in – now that’s an examination which would fill our theatre!”

So did programmes such as Breaking The Magician’s Code do much long term damage to magic? Hopefully not, but it certainly showed non-magicians that a lot of secrets are simply ugly and mundane. Remember Julius Dein’s appearance on Good Morning Britain when the camera picked up the invisible thread used to make a pair of spectacles move on a tabletop? It was actually quite amusing reading his fans express their outrage on social media. Did they really think he had magical powers? Or did they think the method would be more elegant than it was? Into my head popped the headline: ‘Magician uses secret thread shock!’

With great card magicians, however, even if you know the moves and sleights you can still appreciate the performance. When an expert such as Michael Vincent executes a side-steal – you may know what he’s doing, you may know roughly when he does it, but you can’t see him do it. And therein lies true magic.
But let’s leave the final comment to seasoned performer Doc Dixon, who beautifully summed up the Masked Magician TV show – in that Atlanta bar-room drawl of his – with one simple down-to-earth line:
“All I could picture in my head was the guy who’d just spent two grand on a Zig-Zag the week before.”

Let us know what you think about YouTube ‘exposure’ in the comments below.

Twitter For Magicians – 8 Top Tips

by Merchant of Magic Leave a Comment

By Paul Osborne

Paul runs Merchant of Magic’s Twitter account. A former teenage magician, he took a brief 30 years off to pursue drumming and standup comedy. Now back in love with magic, he’s slowly working his way through Royal Road to Card Magic and Bobo‘s Modern Coin Magic.

Firstly, let me say, I’m not some bright young thing with a man bun, smart shoes/no socks, and a degree in marketing and social media. I’m just someone who has used Twitter a lot over the past few years and kept an eye on what works and what doesn’t; looking at which accounts get a lot of followers, and why — and which posts get a lot of retweets.

So I thought I’d put together a few tips to help those magicians — or magic fans — who want to grow a following on social media.

This is the most important tip. But what do I mean by ‘sharing’? Well, just sitting there sending out a couple of tweets a day about your new magic show is a waste of time. Most people follow a lot of accounts (sometimes thousands). The chances of them seeing your lone tweet in their timeline are nil. I’m not saying don’t send out these tweets, I’m saying you must do lots of other things as well.

And this is where the sharing bit comes in. Make a list of other magic accounts that you like — ones that tweet interesting stuff about magic, [John Cox @HoudiniWild tweets daily about Houdini, for instance] and regularly retweet them. What often happens is, after a while, people will also start checking out your account because they know you retweet interesting posts. Go through your list every day to check for new posts from these Twitter users. It gives you a more structured way of using Twitter.

Secondly, if someone mentions you in a post [eg, ‘I saw your magic show last night, it was brilliant!’] don’t just hit the ‘like’ button; retweet it as well. It’s a way of saying thank you to the person who left the comment and it’s also a bit more promotion for you. Sharing the love!

And comment on other people’s posts. Add to the conversation if it interests you. It will get your name about.

2. You don’t have to be on Twitter ALL the time, but you do have to use it regularly.

When I first started using Twitter I was often amazed at how certain ‘normal’ people (ie, not celebrities, businesses, etc) would get Twitter followings of 8,000, 9,000, 10,000 people. After a while, I realised that many of these people are, not only, on the platform for hours at a time, but they are also regularly commenting on other people’s posts and retweeting other people’s comments and posts — sharing, you see. And then the circle of people they interact with gradually grows over time — and so does their following.

Now, most busy magicians — or working magic fans — probably haven’t got time to spend hours on Twitter, but a little structured, regular use will help. Effective Twitter for magicians only needs about 30 minutes in the morning, 30 minutes in the evening? Or put aside some time at weekends. And if you regularly travel by train, then that would be a good time for Twitter sessions on your mobile phone.

And if you’re spending that time retweeting other accounts’ content, then you’ll only be using one hand (either your smartphone scrolling thumb or your mouse if you’re on your laptop) so why not practise a few coin sleights with your other hand? Kill two birds with one stone.

The important thing is that the time needs to be spread out over the day. I spend two hours in the morning on Merchant of Magic’s account, an hour late afternoon, and 30 minutes in the evening. (plus a few stints over the weekend to keep it ticking over.) If I compressed all those hours into just, say, mornings, then I’d miss any engagement/comments posted during the afternoon and evening.

3. As well as retweeting others, post interesting content yourself.

As a magician, you’ve got a skill that ‘normal people don’t have. So make sure you’re regularly posting interesting stuff about magic. It could just be a photo of you performing at that wedding last weekend. Or a photo of the latest trick you’re working on. A show or event coming up. Anything interesting. (eg, The Magic Mod @taylormod posts a Magic Mod Monday trick every week, which is very popular)

Why aren’t you posting some of your thoughts on magic? Sharing clips from YouTube of your favourite magicians? Or asking questions of the magic community, ‘What’s the worst gig you’ve ever done?’ etc. People love getting involved with these sorts of questions because it’s good fun for everyone to chip in.

And, briefly, on the subject of ‘divisive topics’, if you’re just using Twitter to promote yourself as a magician — or you’re a magic fan and want to build a following of other magic fans — then I’d personally steer clear of tweeting about politics, religion, etc, which may put some people off revisiting your site if they don’t share your views. But it’s a personal choice, of course. One way around it would be to have two Twitter accounts – one for your magic tweets and one for politics. But, again, it’s up to you. Tweeting about politics could actually help you build a following of people in your political camp if that’s what you want.

4. Don’t forget to tag in relevant accounts.

Here’s one of the Twitter mistakes I see a lot. Someone will, say, write an interesting blog about a forthcoming magic show, and they’ll just tweet out their blog post, and that’s it. Why haven’t they tagged in the magicians involved? Why haven’t they tagged in the theatre? Theatres often retweet favourable blogs/previews etc because it’s good publicity for them. If you’re writing about Mac King’s show, or you just mention Mac King in a tweet, tag in Mac King! He may retweet it, you never know.

5. Follow people back.

If someone follows you, follow them back. It’s just a nice thing to do. I’m always amused when I see people who follow no one, and into my head pops the phrase: ‘How incurious of you!’ (Sometimes follow-backs are missed, so if you’re reading this and we haven’t followed you back then give us a nudge!)

6. Make sure you have a good pinned tweet.

Twitter lets you ‘pin’ one tweet — which means that it always sits at the top of your profile. So when someone visits your Twitter site they will see that tweet first. So, if you have a show, event, or just a general tweet about you as a magician that you want people to see, then pin it to your profile. Just google ‘how to pin a tweet’ if you’re unsure how to do it.

Your whole Twitter for magicians strategy should be about creating an interesting Twitter site that encourages people to check out your account, see your pinned tweet and then check out your timeline.

7. Twitter banner pictures need to look good.

Make sure the photographs at the top of your site look great. A good picture of you performing, for instance, or a posed picture in your stage clothes. (Not in your hoodie drinking a cup of tea — unless that’s your act!) Or how about a photo of a selection of magic tricks? You can get some good photos on free images websites.

And think about the words in your bio. Put yourselves in the shoes of a magic fan checking out your account for the first time. Does it sound professional? It could even be something simple such as ‘Professional magician’ with a link to your website, or ‘Magic fan’. And make sure you double-check the spelling, grammar etc.

8. Getting followers if you’re new to Twitter.

If you’re new to Twitter and have zero followers then, first of all, you need to follow a bunch of people so that a proportion of people follow you back. But beware of visiting a famous magician’s followers and going down the long list hitting ‘follow’. Twitter may think you’re a bot and briefly kick you off. So be a bit selective. It’s probably better to search for the word ‘magician’ or ‘magic fan’ and find other magic enthusiasts to follow that way.

And finally…

Remember, it may take a few months to start building a group of people who regularly interact with you, so be patient — and just enjoy it.

If you have any more tips/ideas, please leave a comment.