John Nevil Maskelyne rose to prominence in 1865 exposing the tricks of the Davenport Brothers, a pair of performers who allowed their audiences to believe spirits were creating their magical effects. With the cabinet maker George Alfred Cooke, Maskelyne toured Britain becoming a well-known stage conjurer. Within eight years Maskelyne and Cooke established England’s Home of Mystery at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly and their performances became a popular fixture of London life.
Alongside his stage magic career, Maskelyne maintained his campaigns against fraudulent spiritualists who preyed on the vulnerable and bereaved. In this book, published in 1876, a time of huge expansion for the spiritualism movement, Maskelyne gave his account of the most famous mediums of the time, exposing their trickery. It is a rare record produced when many of the first generation of spiritualist mediums were still active.
Maskelyne discussed the roots of modern spiritualism and the stories and trickery of mediums including the Fox Sisters, Daniel Douglas Home, the Davenport Brothers, Anna Eva Fay and many others. He exposed the true methods behind supposed table rapping, spirit painting, spirit writing, dark séances, spirit photography and supernatural healing.
Condition: New.
Binding: Paperback
Year: 2025
Publisher: CollectingMagicBooks.com
Pages: 182
Dimensions (to nearest cm): 22 X 14cm
The C.M.B. Classics Range:
The C.M.B Classics range are high-quality facsimiles of the great classics of magic literature, scanned in-house from original editions and painstakingly manually edited to produce clean and legible pages. These are not to be confused with unedited reprints produced from freely available low-quality scans, or automated OCR editions, available print-on-demand from numerous other retailers. This range is exclusive to CollectingMagicBooks.com.
We have worked closely with a long-established commercial printer in London to produce the best quality at an affordable price to bring the classics of magic within reach of all magicians. By producing the files properly and employing a commercial printer, avoiding hands-off automated print-on-demand and OCR technology, we believe these books really are the finest available at this price point.