Indian Conjuring was one of the most complete and accurate attempts to record the performance and methods of actual Indian street magicians. The book is also notable for its part in the legendary story of the Indian Rope Trick, with Branson using this book to explain his belief that it had never been performed and to offer a cash reward for anyone who could perform it.
It is perhaps this aspect of the book that it is most famous for but, arguably, its greatest value is in the recording of Indian tricks that were actually performed. For this Branson was indebted to Shah Mahommed, the third in a line of conjurers. Mahommed taught Branson these effects and appears performing them in the book’s photographs.
While Branson writes warmly of his friend Mahommed, and clearly has a great interest in Indian magic, he was a major in the British Indian Army while India was under colonial rule. In this context, some of Branson’s statements have not stood the test of time. Putting that aside, the expert knowledge of Shah Mahommed, paired with Branson’s thoroughness, make this an invaluable record of an often overlooked field of magic.
Condition: New
Binding: Paperback
Year: 2025
Publisher: CollectingMagicBooks.com
Pages: 103
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.