Magic history
All my reading about magic and illusion has focussed into the History of Magic of late. I've been reading several books about the golden age of magic and each book just leads me on to 5 more that I want to read.
The frustrating thing is that many of these books are rare and over 100 years old. I started getting annoyed that I just wouldn't be able to own/ have access to the books I wanted to learn from, but in the past few days i've found some gems of websites!
Scribd.com is a project to scan old and rare books from university collections for anyone to read online. They have some old Houdini books that I wanted to read up there. It is good, but the illustrations and photographs are not there which means that I'm missing out on a lot of what the book has to offer.
Today I discovered a few amazing magic book stores which have a lot of the old books reprinted for more reasonable prices. I treated myself to a reprint of Kellars book in a limited 500 copy run with reprint of a very rare booklet and a few others to start me off. Still an expensive hobby, but far more accessible. They even have the full works of Houdini on CD ROM so I can read the book I started online with Illustrations. I'll save that for the next order! Oh and Jake... there is a reprint of "Our magic" by Maskelyne and Devant in existence, so we could read that sometime.
Next stop Simons library and a trip to the magic circle to dribble over theirs.
I'm not the academic type and It's amazing me that I've got so hooked on a subject, that I find myself taking notes as I read. I'm hungry for knowledge and I hope it lasts!!
The frustrating thing is that many of these books are rare and over 100 years old. I started getting annoyed that I just wouldn't be able to own/ have access to the books I wanted to learn from, but in the past few days i've found some gems of websites!
Scribd.com is a project to scan old and rare books from university collections for anyone to read online. They have some old Houdini books that I wanted to read up there. It is good, but the illustrations and photographs are not there which means that I'm missing out on a lot of what the book has to offer.
Today I discovered a few amazing magic book stores which have a lot of the old books reprinted for more reasonable prices. I treated myself to a reprint of Kellars book in a limited 500 copy run with reprint of a very rare booklet and a few others to start me off. Still an expensive hobby, but far more accessible. They even have the full works of Houdini on CD ROM so I can read the book I started online with Illustrations. I'll save that for the next order! Oh and Jake... there is a reprint of "Our magic" by Maskelyne and Devant in existence, so we could read that sometime.
Next stop Simons library and a trip to the magic circle to dribble over theirs.
I'm not the academic type and It's amazing me that I've got so hooked on a subject, that I find myself taking notes as I read. I'm hungry for knowledge and I hope it lasts!!