The Old and The New Magic is a remarkable conjuring text. Written by the magic historian Henry Ridgely Evans at the height of magic’s golden age, it was one of the most ambitious books of the time published on the history of magic. It provides an amazing insight into how magicians and magic history were viewed in the first decade of the twentieth century.
In addition to chapters on subjects deemed historical in 1906 - 1909, there are also sections on many of the leading performing magicians of the period, which are now themselves of great historical interest. These conjurers include Harry Houdini, Chung Ling Soo, John Nevil Maskelyne, Howard Thurston, Buatier de Kolta and the Herrmann dynasty, among many others.
Beyond these stage magicians, the book also contains a great deal of information on subjects that merged and conflicted with performance magic. These include sections on Automata, Second Sight, The Davenport Brothers, Natural Magic, Theosophy, Indian Fakirs and the life of Félicien Trewey. It includes further detailed explanatory sections on optical effects and illusions of producing ghosts on stage.
The book was ground-breaking and became an instant classic. Its reputation was such that it earned a place on Dr. A. M. Wilson’s famous list of the “Ten Best Magic Books”. This is a facsimile reprint of the greatly-expanded second edition, first printed in 1909
Condition: New.
Binding: Paperback
Year: 2025
Publisher: CollectingMagicBooks.com
Pages: 550
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.