... and they told you to avoid books and just "develop physically," but you insisted that you'd rather die than be kept from books, and they said, well, okay then... what is the one book you would want?
And here it is. You can read the whole thing at Project Gutenberg — "The Magician's Own Book or The Whole Art of Conjuring/Being a Complete Hand-Book of Parlor Magic and Containing Over One Thousand Optical, Chemical, Mechanical, Magnetical, and Magical Experiments, Amusing Transmutations, Astonishing Sleights and Subtleties, Celebrated Card Deceptions, Ingenious Tricks with Numbers, Curious and Entertaining Puzzles, Together with the Most Noted Tricks of Modern Performers"!
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13 comments:
I'll have to check this book out! I am terrible at magic tricks.
I wonder if Project G has The Anarchist's Cookbook... My long-ago youthful ex had that book. Fascinating.
A two camera set-up for this interview?
"The Science of Pre-flight Aeronautics" obtained for $.05 at a book fair.
The US will be 246 years old this year. That's only three people ago.
I missed that book as a kid, but it would have been my go to, too...
We gift these now. These two would have worked, too...
I seem to recall Thomas Edison also read this book or similar as a youngster in Ohio. Amazing what some kids in the 1800s could absorb.
So cool, thanks for drawing our attention! He had that classic faux-Mid American accent, except that he pronounced the word "first" as "foist." I wonder how that came to be---I always thought that was a NYC pronunciation (and also New Orleans). He grew up in Philadelphia and we certainly don't speak that way now.
David S - my father was born in 1896. My grandchildren will probably live to see the 22nd century. I sometimes feel as though I could stretch out my arms and touch the 19th century with one hand and the 22nd with the other.
If the same information in that book were released today, it would BE a YouTube video. No need to read!
Extremely charming interview.
Its amazing that someone who saw the end of the Civil war could live long enough to see the A-Bomb and Jet Aircrat. 1865 to 1945 was only 80 years. What a change in the world in such a short time.
By comparison 1942 seems like Yesterday.
In 1864 where? That is important because every nation is different, and in the USA there was a civil war and any how every state was different and not the same within states.
It is like people asserting g something about medieval European law when the medieval period was about 1,000 years and Europe was a big and disunited place.
Facinating! And it teaches us what we can learn from learning stuff. We could learn a lot from the internet today, but the process discourages depth.
I'm pretty sure he referred to a "leyden jar", not a "lightning jar" (although the latter's a pretty good description of the former).
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