First published in 1898, Twentieth Century Magic was a highly ambitious and creative magic book for the time. It struck out on its own using the latest technology and engineering to present innovative and original conjuring tricks. Nevil Monroe Hopkins began publishing his conjuring tricks in the American Electrician, a journal dedicated to the rapidly evolving world of electrical engineering. A few of these articles were printed in the prominent early magic magazine Mahatma in the lead-up to the publication of Twentieth Century Magic.
Most of the highly engineered magic tricks in this book would have been out of reach of the average working magician of the late nineteenth century. It’s hard to say how many of these effects were actually built or tested, but there are some genuinely practical methods and engaging effects within these pages.
Despite the popularity and influence of this book, Hopkins success as an electrical engineer took him away from the world of magic. A passionate supporter of women’s suffrage in America, he is probably best remembered as a pioneer of electronic voting systems, a specialism driven by his strong desire to increase democracy in his country.
Condition: New.
Binding: Paperback
Year: 2025
Publisher: CollectingMagicBooks.com
Pages: 162
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.