«Magic Tricks made easy»

«Magic Tricks made easy»
By Patrick Page, 1977

This is one of the first books that I remember getting when I was younger. It was not what got me started in magic, since I had already quite a bit of interest in the subject. But it had the advantage of being available, relatively easy to understand (so I thought…), and showed four different types of magic:

- Tricks with cards,
- Tricks with coins,
- Tricks with handkerchiefs,
- Tricks with paper.

The first part of this book taught three moves with cards: the hindu shuffle, the glide, and the top stock shuffle. Looking back, I can tell you that the explanations leaved quite bit to be desired, the tricks explained have potential to be really good, but not the way they were shown here.

The same can also be said of all the other sections of this book. The section on coins taught a few basic things, like classic palm, thumb palm, front and back palm, etc… But was severely lacking in showing how to use these techniques effectively. Again, most of the tricks shown can be made to be entertaining, but not in the way it was shown in the book.

As you can tell by this review, I am not particularly impressed by this book. I believe it is still available here and there on the internet, but I would not bother with it. Lots of much better material is available to anyone serious enough to study magic.

The only things I vaguely find interesting in this book is the final section on paper magic, which has interesting effects like paper tearing (not my favorite version, but it is workable…), paper ladder, tree and fence, folding money…

Have a good day!


Louis Jutras
The Montreal magician / le magicien de Montreal