Before Robinson rose to fame under the stage name Chung Ling Soo, he had already had a long and successful career in magic. He had specialised in “Black Art” and through that act became an assistant and stage manager to Alexander Herrmann and Harry Keller. He wrote this book just a few years prior to coming out of the shadows, relaunching as a supposedly Chinese conjurer. That act would end with his shocking death on stage when a trick went awry.
This book capitalizes on the rapid growth on spiritualism towards the end of the 19th century, exposing the many methods used by fraudulent spirit mediums to make messages appear on slates. He also explains other methods of mediums including table tipping, rapping and spirit ties. Unlike most of his contemporaries exposing this fraud, Robinson claims to believe in spiritualism.
The book also contains many mentalism and conjuring effects by Robinson and W. B. Caulk. Robinson was preparing a book of secrets for the magic community when he died, though this never surfaced. As such, this book is the best surviving record of the secrets of one of the most successful stage magicians of the golden age.
Condition: New
Binding: Paperback
Year: 2025
Publisher: CollectingMagicBooks.com
Pages: 148
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.