Can someone help me identify this ring and string effect?

[Jeremy Gessaro]

I was severely confounded by this effect and I would like to practice and rehearse it myself. I will describe it as I saw and remember it, hopefully someone will let me know a source for this effect.

The magician cuts a long length of string from a spool, probably 5-6 feet. He then asks the spectator to inspect the string. The magician then props up a hard cover book standing on end in a "V" fashion so that the inside of the book is toward the performer and the cover is toward the audience; this forms an impromptu screen. He then takes the string and places both ends over the top of the propped up book and places them both on the audience side then winds the middle portion of the string on the performer side of the impromptu screen. He then asks the spectator to look at the performer side of the screen and see that the middle of the string is intact. At this time, the performer asks to borrow the spectator's finger ring. The magician takes the ring behind the impromptu screen, out of site, and makes some movements. The magician then reaches over the impromptu screen and takes the ends of the string that were left in full view the whole time and still lying on the audience side and starts pulling the slack out of the string toward the audience until the middle of the sting finally emerges with the borrowed spectator's ring magically threaded on the string.

Does anyone have any idea what effect this might be and perhaps where to find it?

Thanks for any help on this.

[Pete Biro]

It is in a film Fred Kaps made years ago. Slydini also has a method and currently Dean Dill has come up with an improved way to do it.

It is very very old.

[Jeremy Gessaro]

Thanks, Pete.

Is it located in any literature anywhere? Perhaps a book on Slydini material?

[Richard Kaufman]

I think it's in the second Fulves book, Magical World of Slydini. If not there, then it's in the Chronicles.

[Jon Racherbaumer]

J. G. Thompson Jr. used a hat instead of a book and his method is different. It was published in M-U-M...

Onward...

[Doomo]

It is cool to see Kaps do it on film... Well, dvd now that I had it transfered...

[Pete Biro]

Dean Dill has some "new" work on it to fry those that think they know. First time I saw this Kaps fried me... likewise when Slydini was doing it.

The "roots" of the modus operandi can be found in Discouverie of Witchcraft, Scot.

[Guest]

In an old set of lecture notes, Dick Koornwinder
detailed his handling of this effect while on a USA tour. This was the inspiration for Horace Bennett to offer his "Koornwinder's Konceit"
on page 123 of "The Bennett Touch" in 1986
published by Jerry Mentzer.

Woody

[Raj Madhok]

There's a nifty impromptu in the hands version buried in Apocalypse called "Handy Sefalalgia". I believe it's by a little known East Indian magician.

[Guest]

I have seen the effect in Jinx edited by Theo Annemann and it is called Sephalgia(...actually means Headache).

[Bill Palmer]

Not Sephalgia, Sefalaljia. At least that's how Crimmins spelled it in Annemann's Practical Mental Effects.

The correct medical spelling is "cephalgia."

[Bill Wells]

Another excellence reference:

Steward James in Print: The First Fifty Years. Edited by P. Howard Lyons and Allan Slaight

Chapter 12 - "Sefalajia: The Source and The Name"

page 187 - 197