The Boys Book Of Conjuring

The Boys Book of Conjuring (c.1950s) by Unknown – Ward, Lock & Co.

There was a time when a perfectly acceptable way to entertain children was to hand them a book of conjuring tricks and trust that the curtains, crockery and family cat would somehow survive.

The Boys Book of Conjuring, published by Ward, Lock & Co. around the 1950s, belongs very much to that era.

No batteries.

No screens.

No parental-control settings.

Just coins, cards, string, handkerchiefs, cups, boxes and the dangerous confidence that, with enough practice, one could astonish the entire household before tea.

This is a practical little guide to the old-fashioned art of magic: sleight of hand, simple illusions, parlour tricks and those wonderfully ingenious effects that rely less on expensive equipment and more on knowing exactly what the audience is not looking at.

Which, really, is the whole profession.

Conjuring is one of humanity’s more charming deceptions.

The magician openly announces that something impossible is about to happen.

The audience knows it is a trick.

Everyone agrees to be fooled anyway.

And if it works properly, the result is delight rather than litigation.

Books like this were designed to teach young readers the mechanics behind that delight.

How to misdirect attention.

How to prepare a trick.

How to handle an object so casually that nobody notices what has actually happened.

And, perhaps most importantly, how to perform the same trick several hundred times in private before attempting it in front of somebody’s aunt.

The emphasis is on practical entertainment.

This is magic for living rooms, school halls, scout huts and rainy afternoons.

The sort of tricks that can be assembled from ordinary household objects and then performed with enough confidence to make a younger sibling briefly reconsider the laws of physics.

Published in the 1950s, the book also has that unmistakable period flavour of boys’ practical manuals.

A boy was apparently expected to have hobbies.

Useful hobbies.

Interesting hobbies.

Preferably hobbies involving knots, model aeroplanes, experiments or unexplained objects disappearing under handkerchiefs.

Nobody appears to have worried too much about whether the dining table had consented to become part of the act.

There is something especially appealing about older conjuring books because they preserve the mechanics of magic before everything became a video tutorial.

You could not simply replay the trick in slow motion.

You had to read the instructions.

Look at the diagrams.

Try it.

Get it wrong.

Try it again.

Then eventually perform it successfully and behave as though the whole thing had been effortless.

A valuable life skill, frankly.

The unknown authorship only adds to the atmosphere.

A mysterious book of magic tricks by an unnamed writer has exactly the right tone.

Perhaps the author vanished in a puff of smoke before the title page was completed.

More likely it was simply a house publication.

But the first explanation is better.

This copy is in Good condition, making it a pleasing vintage example of a practical entertainment book from an era when a pack of cards and a length of string could apparently occupy an entire afternoon.

Ideal for collectors of vintage children’s books, magic enthusiasts, nostalgia lovers, amateur conjurors or anyone who feels modern entertainment has become unnecessarily dependent on charging cables.

Also suitable for grandparents wishing to demonstrate that before tablets existed, children were perfectly capable of making coins disappear into the furniture.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where disappearing stock is usually considered an inventory problem rather than a successful illusion.

ISBN: None
Condition: Good

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