MORE killer magic that you're NOT doing!

A guidebook to fabulous but forgotten material curated by yours truly...

I’ve been making notes and sticking Post-its in all my books for decades, so I have hundreds and hundreds of great tricks book-marked, annotated and logged, and after some (not so subtle) prompting by friends I finally decided to collect 100 of them together and publish them in a book.

That book – Hidden Gems – proved far more popular than I ever expected! So here we are with Vol. 2 and another 100 killer tricks that most of us have either forgotten about or never even seen before.

These are tricks that define the very concept of 'hidden in print'. In each entry I list the trick, where you can find it, why I love it and why YOU should look it up. I always describe the effect, occasionally the presentation, but NEVER the method.

Here are a few samples:

Hidden Gem #14: ‘The Trick That Cannot Be Reconstructed’ by Dai Vernon, The Vernon Chronicles Vol. 2 (p89). I am a huge fan of two-card transpositions and I’m always swapping methods and info about new ones I find with my closest magic friends. Except for this one. Sorry fellas! It is a three-phase transpo that just looks so utterly impossible. No dupes or gaffs, just Vernon genius.

Hidden Gem #52: ‘H2O’ by Jack Curtis, Distorted Thoughts (p30). This is a beautifully offbeat effect where you twice predict the amount of water a participant will pour into a jug (the prediction takes the form of a sketch) before the tables are turned and the participant predicts how much water you will pour. Great routining and a clever use of complimentary methods that completely cancel each other out.

Hidden Gem #73: ‘True Pencil Through Bill’ by Vanni Bossi, The Aretalogy of Vanni Bossi (p182). If there is one trick that I wish you could see performed before you learn how it’s done, this is it. It is the perfect trick: you really shove a pencil through the middle of a bank note, allowing it to be cleanly seen from every angle. And then you restore the note so that there is no hole. Really! No switch, regular note/bill and normal pencil. This is another once-in-a-lifetime creation and it demands far wider performance while there is still time (you’ll understand what that means once you read the method).