Description

Ignore the front cover of this mammoth collection of self-working card material — one of the authors never existed, and the other should really have added the names of America’s finest card men, given that they created almost all of the effects explained across the four hundred and fifty pages that follow. Crediting issues aside, this is a wonderful resource for card-magic enthusiasts, and its exhaustive approach to its subject matter directly inspired Jean Hugard’s Encyclopedia of Card Tricks a few years later, which revised the routines in this volume and its follow-up while acknowledging their sources. In the Gravatt tome, amusing chapter titles — “Seating the Slick Card King on His Throne,” “Decoying the Stacked Deck from Its Den” — belie the superb quality of the effects contained therein, and both students and historians of magic will find many entries of interest in this rare publication.