The Genii Forum

Edwin Corrie

Oops, sorry, Bill's quite right about Will Blyth. Don't know what came over me. But it was "Paper Magic", not the sequel "More Paper Magic". Blyth calls it a Mechanical Conjuring Trick (<a class="postlink" href="http://magicref.tripod.com/books/blythpapermagic.htm">http...

Edwin Corrie

It's in Will Goldston's "Paper Magic" (1923), but the effect is just a very simple colour change as you switch from one set of faces to the other.

Edwin Corrie

I don't know him personally, but he posts at the Magic Cafe under the name leftytheclown. <a class="postlink" href="http://www.themagiccafe.com/forums/bb_profile.php?mode=view&user=21658">http://www.themagiccafe.com/forums/bb_p ... user=21658</a> If for any reason the link do...

Edwin Corrie

Still waiting for the January issue. The mail to Europe is a lot slower than it used to be.

Edwin Corrie

Jonathan Townsend wrote:The Hatch translation of Hofzinser's Magic has some photos of him using the TroubleWit as well.

There may well be something on Troublewit in Magic Christian's as yet unpublished third volume of his Hofzinser trilogy, though we may have to wait a while for the promised English translation.

Edwin Corrie

I've finally managed to contact David Lister, who is a founder member of the British Origami Society and one of our distinguished origami historians. He is very interested in Troublewit and has done a lot of research on it, as have a number of other origami aficionados. He has an written an article ...

Edwin Corrie

Also in Randy Wakeman's "Special Effects" and "Randy Wakeman Presents". (Has anyone else noticed the similarity in titles with Paul Curry's "Special Effects" and "Paul Curry Presents"?)

Edwin Corrie

I can't check at the moment but I think the Elmsley version was originally in "The Cardiste". A couple more for the collection: Fabulous Four Ace Routine in "The Commercial Magic of J.C. Wagner". He also posted a handling on the Magic Cafe a while back. Christ-Aronson Aces <!-- m...

Edwin Corrie

Interesting the Universal Self-Instructor is very similar to Cassells Book of Indoor Amusements referenced earlier, with identical illustrations but different text. The Source unknown items from Flickr are the Troublewit pages in Kenneways Complete Origami. Illustreret Legebog by Anna Erslev was new...

Edwin Corrie

OK, just a few more references: "Attractions visuelles de complment" by Jean de Merry <a class="postlink" href="http://www.magix.fr/pub/scans/lmx-021.jpg">http://www.magix.fr/pub/scans/lmx-021.jpg</a> Maybe you know it already. I don't have it and can't say whether it c...

Edwin Corrie

The author refers to starched and unstarched linen, though he also suggests practising with paper first. For the complex animal shapes he says you need a needle and thread. In recent years there has been a lot of interest in origami tessellations, and several people have created masks in a way that ...

Edwin Corrie

THIS illustration is from a 1657 book from Germany. The subject is folding napkins for a fancy dinner. While not, strictly speaking, troublewit, the similarities are obvious. It is from Vollstndiges und von neuem vermehrtes Trincir-Buch by Georg Philipp Harsdrffer. Thanks for the link. I'd seen pag...

Edwin Corrie

A couple more things to add (I couldnt resist doing some more checking): Manuel pratique dorigami by Dominique Buisson has a short chapter on Lventail magique that mentions most of the references weve seen in this thread (Ozanam, Sports & Pastimes, Minguet, Alberti). Apparently Troublewit was in...

Edwin Corrie

Hi Andrew, Thanks for the Tom censored link. Im quite heavily into origami but for some reason have never gone into Troublewit in any detail. There are several people who have done a lot of research into the history of paperfolding in both Europe and Asia, and I know of one who has made an extensive...

Edwin Corrie

still digging through Dhotel, although it may be in the volumes that have not yet been translated from French... "Le papier multiforme" was listed in the catalogue as a booklet with around 38 pages. I don't know if it was included in the eight volumes of "La prestidigitation sans bag...

Edwin Corrie

Edwin: Thank you for taking the time to contribute. Lister and Selden will take a while and I am really looking forward to seeing Yoshizawa's troublewit... The Selden book can be viewed here (see page 137 for the reference to "juggler's paper"): http://books.google.com/books?id=6mUlAAAAMA...

Edwin Corrie

I can't help with Pre Mathieu or cite any sources earlier than "Sports and Pastimes", but I can mention a few references. You've obviously researched this a lot, so this might not all be new to you, but here goes: Ozanam's "Rcrations mathmatiques et physiques". Not too sure about...

Edwin Corrie

Andrew: thanks for posting the relevant piece from the Hoffmann translation. Interesting. Jonathan: R-H is definitely saying that the old Latin term would be more appropriate - see my post of 27th April earlier in this thread. The page in question can be seen here: <a class="postlink" href...

Edwin Corrie

I too always felt that "ne ... point" was more forceful than "ne ... pas", but I checked with a French colleague today and her immediate reaction was that it's an archaic form (also mainly a written form rather than a spoken one) which nowadays is only really used in jest. It com...

Edwin Corrie

I believe many of these books (and others) were sold to the general public: <a class="postlink" href="http://geniimagazine.com/magicpedia/Early_Magic_Books">http://geniimagazine.com/magicpedia/Early_Magic_Books</a> But it's also interesting to see that by the beginning of the 20t...

Edwin Corrie

Good grief, and I thought I had a lot. Must show this to my wife.

Edwin Corrie

Philippe could be right about the Buddha Papers being a precursor to the Coin Fold. Maybe the latter was developed precisely because the Buddha Papers can't be shown freely. The main argument against this is perhaps the fact that (at least until Will Blyth in 1923, if not before) the Buddha Papers w...

Edwin Corrie

Philippe: Scot describes two methods in "The Discoverie of Witchcraft". I've never quite understoond the first one, but the second one with the two squares stuck together (Buddha Papers) is a bit different from the classic Coin Fold. The premise is certainly similar, but with the Buddha Pa...

Edwin Corrie

>> That sounds more like "Buddha Paper", then the traditional coin fold (i.e. the coin never actually leaves the paper). Quite right, the trick in "Discoverie of Witchcraft" is the Buddha Papers, which is not the same as the Coin Fold. For the Coin Fold, there's one version (not ...

Edwin Corrie

There's a version in Richard Neve's "Merry Companion" (1716), but in Michael Weber's "Life Savers" (also referenced in "Knack Magic Tricks") it's stated that the principle for this has been traced back to Van Etten's "Mathematicall Recreations" (1633). It prob...

Edwin Corrie

Very sorry to hear this. I didn't know him well, but he was very welcoming when I first came to Geneva and attended some of the magic club meetings. His little magic shop Le Truc Store was also an interesting place to see, and he still remembered me on my last visit even though I hadn't attended any...

Edwin Corrie

Bob McAllister's "The Fastest Card Trick in the Universe" in Apocalypse, November 1985, is a card folded in four that turns inside out, using a dollar bill. Ken Krenzel's version "Slowed Up" (without the dollar bill) is in the January 1987 issue. Jay Sankey published something si...

Edwin Corrie

It might take a while to get to a level where you can read books in Japanese, but when you do there is always Amazon Japan. A quick search for "magic" (tejina) produces the following: http://www.amazon.co.jp/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?__mk_ja_JP=%83J%83%5E%83J%83i&url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&a...

Edwin Corrie

There's also the New York Magic Symposium Collection Five, which has a good section on Japanese magic but might not be easy to find. And Takagi's Coin Assembly and Wild Card were also sold as separate manuscripts.

Edwin Corrie

It's dangerous to read too much into a translation. The quotation should be read in the context not only of the introduction to Robert-Houdin's book (where he talks extensively about the history of magic and magicians) but also of the actual French words he uses. He's making a point about the inadeq...

Edwin Corrie

Ottokar Fischer's description of the Hofzinser "problem" (actually just an effect he was purported to have had a method for) known as The Magic Separation is not very explicit. In his book on Hofzinser, Magic Christian says his extensive examination of Hofziser's letters and manuscripts ha...

Edwin Corrie

Maybe Fusion in "Cardworks"? That's two cards apparently fused together face to face though with backs showing, so maybe not.

Edwin Corrie

Jonathan, Philippe asked about the "Kaufman item" but you haven't told us what it is. It sounds like Ben Harris' "Dimensional Relativity", and the concept seems to me to be quite different from Card Warp.

Edwin Corrie

I can't check the date or exact reference at the moment but there are a couple of methods by Alex Elmsley in his Collected Works.

Edwin Corrie

Guyot's trick starts with the 7H on the face of the deck, followed by the KS, and with a duplicate KS on the top. You show the 7H, glide it back and place the KS on the table. Shuffle the duplicate to the bottom, display it and do another glide to place the 7H on the table. Show the transposition to...

Edwin Corrie

Merci!

Edwin Corrie

This is not really my field (though showing a few odd tricks to my two small daughters is often an interesting experience), but in case no one else mentions it I can direct you to David Kaye's books and lecture notes, which seem to be quite authoritative: http://www.sillymagic.com/printedMaterial.ht...

Edwin Corrie

This trick was patented in France in january 4th 1954 by Jean Elambert. FR1049916 Dispositif d'escamotage et d'amusement The impossible location is a set of shell-like containers secured by rubber bands. Presumably that's what the patent examiner considered to be "novel and inventive" in ...

Edwin Corrie

Ah, okay. I guess I shouldn't have said it was "probably" the Tenyo one and assumed it was the first version. Yes, the Tenyo model had a safety pin on the slide, and the handkerchief was gaffed for the vanish of the coin. Come to think of it, there was another very ingenious Tenyo item cal...

Edwin Corrie

Tom Stone referred above (January 2003) to Con-Sequence from Phil Goldstein's book "Focus", which is interesting because it's a version in which the back colour of the last card changes, rather than the face. But the book also says the effect was inspired by Hamman's Amorphous Ace and an u...

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