Maskelyne's Book of Magic (Submitted by Vince Hancock)
Posted: June 25th, 2015, 9:58 pm
It has been quite a long time since the old Book of the Month Club has seen new life. My thanks to Vince Hancock for this somewhat controversial contribution. (Note that this controversy is over the book, not CARC, and anyone doing to this thread what happened to The Sphinx thread will have their posts disappear. Thanks in advance for keeping your comments about this book.)
The free eBook offer is ending soon, so jump on that; a link is below.
Thanks again to Vince for his first foray into this fun and frivolity. I hope it's not his last. To the rest of you, please to enjoy:
Maskelyne's Book of Magic
In the Winter 1935 issue of his Magical Quarterly, Will Goldston announced Jasper Maskelyne's upcoming Book of Magic.
The notice said the volume would contain "eighty thousand words." It did not predict how many of those would be Goldston's. Nor did it guess at the quantity lifted from another English writer, Will Blyth.
Over several months between 1937 and 1938, the youngest member of the Maskelyne dynasty, within magic circles, publicly apologized to Goldston for the plagiarism. He took out ads in magazines, including Goldston's own Magical Quarterly. The confession read:
APOLOGY
To Mr. Will Goldston,
I am extremely sorry that in the production of MASKELYNE'S BOOK OF MAGIC a quantity of the material contained in books written by you, was, without my knowledge, copied almost verbatim, and in no case any acknowledgment given to you. I very much regret the infringement of your rights and the injustice which has been done to you. I, therefore, welcome the opportunity of publishing this apology in the Press at my expense.
Jasper Maskelyne.
Solicitors for the Plaintiff:HUGHES, HOOKER & CO.,26 Budge Row, London, E.C.2
There's no evidence of a similar public apology to Will Blyth, whose book Paper Magic of 1923 appears to have mined for Maskelyne's chapter on the same topic. In the case of some trick descriptions, almost 60 percent of the text was copied directly from Blyth, including the sequence of multiple tricks. Much of the rest was paraphrased. Blyth died in 1937.
In the last ten years, Jasper Maskelyne's reputation as a war hero has been questioned, with new research conducted by Richard Stokes. In one essay, concerned with the question of general credibility, Stokes cites the instance of admitted plagiarism.
A portion of the traditional publishing world appears to be unwilling to admit the same. In 2009, Dover Publications, a popular source of classic magic books, reprinted Maskelyne's Book of Magic with an introduction by Edwin A. Dawes. Even 70 years later, however, Dover blocked four critical remarks by Dawes from accompanying the original text. One of them was a gentle rebuke towards Maskeylne's co-author, Arthur Groom, for not being "punctilious in acknowledging his sources."
The Conjuring Arts Research Center (CARC) has published its own electronic edition of the Maskelyne/Groom work. Through Saturday, they offer it for free, as the first selection in its Summer Reading promotion:
https://shop.conjuringarts.org/store/pc ... YxkZhtViko
Within its pages, Maskelyne's Book of Magic offers encouragement for performers who don't have svelte figures and provides glimpses into the persistence demanded of Howard Thurston in his early years. It even hammers on the theme of presentation taking precedence over sleights. While questions of authorship remain, what helpful points can be gleaned from the text? What lessons, perhaps unintended, can be learned from it?
Sources:
http://askalexander.org/display/15670/G ... arterly/22
http://askalexander.org/display/15677/G ... uarterly/8
and also
https://www.lybrary.com/knowledge_base_ ... er+apology
The Magic Wand, Vol. 27, Number 177 March-May, 1938 )
http://www.geniimagazine.com/magicpedia/Will_Blyth
Comparison of texts. Statistics derived from use of http://www.copyscape.com/, CARC's Maskelyne/Groom text and Lybrary.com's Blyth text (within its Learned Pig Project archives)
https://www.lybrary.com/tlpp/books/paper1/01.html.
http://www.maskelynemagic.com/Resources/Munchausen.pdf
http://www.themagiccafe.com/forums/view ... &forum=135
Vince Hancock
Three Pines Gander
The free eBook offer is ending soon, so jump on that; a link is below.
Thanks again to Vince for his first foray into this fun and frivolity. I hope it's not his last. To the rest of you, please to enjoy:
Maskelyne's Book of Magic
In the Winter 1935 issue of his Magical Quarterly, Will Goldston announced Jasper Maskelyne's upcoming Book of Magic.
The notice said the volume would contain "eighty thousand words." It did not predict how many of those would be Goldston's. Nor did it guess at the quantity lifted from another English writer, Will Blyth.
Over several months between 1937 and 1938, the youngest member of the Maskelyne dynasty, within magic circles, publicly apologized to Goldston for the plagiarism. He took out ads in magazines, including Goldston's own Magical Quarterly. The confession read:
APOLOGY
To Mr. Will Goldston,
I am extremely sorry that in the production of MASKELYNE'S BOOK OF MAGIC a quantity of the material contained in books written by you, was, without my knowledge, copied almost verbatim, and in no case any acknowledgment given to you. I very much regret the infringement of your rights and the injustice which has been done to you. I, therefore, welcome the opportunity of publishing this apology in the Press at my expense.
Jasper Maskelyne.
Solicitors for the Plaintiff:HUGHES, HOOKER & CO.,26 Budge Row, London, E.C.2
There's no evidence of a similar public apology to Will Blyth, whose book Paper Magic of 1923 appears to have mined for Maskelyne's chapter on the same topic. In the case of some trick descriptions, almost 60 percent of the text was copied directly from Blyth, including the sequence of multiple tricks. Much of the rest was paraphrased. Blyth died in 1937.
In the last ten years, Jasper Maskelyne's reputation as a war hero has been questioned, with new research conducted by Richard Stokes. In one essay, concerned with the question of general credibility, Stokes cites the instance of admitted plagiarism.
A portion of the traditional publishing world appears to be unwilling to admit the same. In 2009, Dover Publications, a popular source of classic magic books, reprinted Maskelyne's Book of Magic with an introduction by Edwin A. Dawes. Even 70 years later, however, Dover blocked four critical remarks by Dawes from accompanying the original text. One of them was a gentle rebuke towards Maskeylne's co-author, Arthur Groom, for not being "punctilious in acknowledging his sources."
The Conjuring Arts Research Center (CARC) has published its own electronic edition of the Maskelyne/Groom work. Through Saturday, they offer it for free, as the first selection in its Summer Reading promotion:
https://shop.conjuringarts.org/store/pc ... YxkZhtViko
Within its pages, Maskelyne's Book of Magic offers encouragement for performers who don't have svelte figures and provides glimpses into the persistence demanded of Howard Thurston in his early years. It even hammers on the theme of presentation taking precedence over sleights. While questions of authorship remain, what helpful points can be gleaned from the text? What lessons, perhaps unintended, can be learned from it?
Sources:
http://askalexander.org/display/15670/G ... arterly/22
http://askalexander.org/display/15677/G ... uarterly/8
and also
https://www.lybrary.com/knowledge_base_ ... er+apology
The Magic Wand, Vol. 27, Number 177 March-May, 1938 )
http://www.geniimagazine.com/magicpedia/Will_Blyth
Comparison of texts. Statistics derived from use of http://www.copyscape.com/, CARC's Maskelyne/Groom text and Lybrary.com's Blyth text (within its Learned Pig Project archives)
https://www.lybrary.com/tlpp/books/paper1/01.html.
http://www.maskelynemagic.com/Resources/Munchausen.pdf
http://www.themagiccafe.com/forums/view ... &forum=135
Vince Hancock
Three Pines Gander