The Power Of Old Magic Magazines

Rory has tasked me with writing an evergreen article. So here’s an article about why you can’t throw away any magic magazines, lecture notes or scribbles Dani DaOrtiz made on a beer mat in the Ruskin.

So evergreen, you’ll probably have to ask your inbuilt AI assistant who I was. 'Alexia: who was Abel from Kane & Abel?' A quick skim of my Wikipedia page will reveal I fulfilled all my magical ambitions before dying in the cold embrace of my robot wife, aged 118.

Talking of death. The total opposite of evergreen, I’ll admit but still essential for this piece. My grandfather died surrounded by decades worth of Linking Ring, Budget, Magicgram, Genii, Abra, Magic, Pentagram and Popularmagic magazines.

Reading these magazines and learning the published tricks within had been one of his great life passions. He’d passed some of them down to my brother, and I - who I perform the Kane & Abel act with - but now I own them all. I felt I owed it to my granddad to make sure there weren’t any secrets too good to lose in these old magazines.

I opened a Linking Ring magazine. I slightly hoped to find the tricks were so tired, out-of-date and hackneyed that I wouldn’t need to check anymore.

The opposite happened.

Inside Linking Ring, Volume 73, No9 from September 1993 was eight brilliant tricks from the mind of Max Maven. Before Max passed away, he published his PRISM Colour Series of Mentalism book. It currently RRPs at about £50. I’ve read it. It’s wonderful. He released this book because his original colour mentalism booklets were being slung on the internet for thousands of pounds, and he felt uneasy about it. So they were packaged together in one great book - PRISM. What this proves is that rare material from brilliant minds is of interest. An interest people will pay big bucks for.

Why? Well, as the world evolves, these ideas change with it. What was ok or fine in 1979 can be combined with the technology or the social context of 2023 and become the greatest single magic idea of all time.

What I unearthed in that Linking Ring was rare routines from the brilliant mind of Max Maven. Routines people don’t know about. Routines that are given decades to breathe only need a few adjustments to become modern miracles.

These eight tricks gave me solutions for some routines I’d dreamed up but didn’t have the right method for yet.

And that’s just in the first magazine I opened. I dove into the pile of Linking Ring magazines in front of me and unearthed more Max Maven gems in October 1979's Linking Ring. Max was also the cover star for this edition, in which he shared his workings on some of Ted Annemann's material. A reference was made to Maven's award-winning 1977 Linking Ring One Man Parade, so off I went in search of that. At this point, I'm half expecting to find rare Max Maven tricks published before his birth. But it's not just Max Maven's work that is hidden in classic magic magazines.

I scoured the pages in front of me and found rare tricks from other great minds - Pat Page, Tommy Wonder, Juan Tamarez, Lance Burton, Ali Bongo, Roy Walton, Rafael Benatar, Mike Close and many more. I cross-referenced these tricks, tips, and ideas with the published books by these magicians, and guess what.

They aren’t in them. These ideas can no longer be bought. They are rare, unique, and mine all mine. Well. Buy me a pint, and I'll lend you, anyone you want.

I bet you’ve got some of your own hidden in the back of a cupboard. That old magazine you picked up years ago could have a method or idea that you can tweak to become your great invention.

It could even provide you with that trick you’ve been longing for to fool Penn & Teller with or knock the socks off everyone at FISM. You. Yes, you could have everything you need to achieve everything you want. It isn’t in a dealer's hall or on a fancy website. It’s crammed in the back of your drawers.

Or that great idea in the latest Magicseen magazine that nobody does anything with could be worth something to you in a decade. So, sorry non-magic partners who are desperate for us to Spring clean our magic magazines, but they can’t go. They must stay. Because they will only get better with time.

How’s that for evergreen?