The Great Illusionists by Edwin A. Dawes

Details: Most of us respond with thrill to feats of the impossible. Whether the tricks are small, as when four kings are found in the middle of the pack, or large as when a beautiful woman floats across the stage, the excitement is the same. It is difficult to pin down the reason. We know after all, that the magician doesn’t have special powers.

Conjuring has a venerable history. It started long ago when primitive medicine, magic, science, and religion were all mysteriously together. Illusionists became itinerants during the Middle Ages and the Elizabethan Era, emerging with a new dignity in the eighteenth century. From tavern and fair ground they moved into small theaters, and in the nineteenth century into the new music hall. There, magic flourished, reaching a height of popularity in the first decade of the twentieth century. Today television has added a new dimension to the conjurer’s art.

Using splendid and unique prints, playbills and memorabilia with entertaining narrative, this book tells the story of magic through the lives of magicians, many of whom have become legend. The author, himself a magician and a scientist, goes into scientific mysteries used by enterprising magicians such as the solar microscope and electromagnet.

This book about magic and magicians gives us a look behind the mirrors to the ways people were baffled for centuries and takes us into the lives of magicians from the earliest days to the present.

The Author: Professor Edwin A Dawes, PhD, DSc, FRIC, Reckitt Professor and Head of the Biochemistry Department at the University of Hull, is a Gold Star Member of the Inner Magic Circle of London and an Honorary Vice President of that organization. He was President of the British Ring of the International Brotherhood of Magicians in 1972-73 and is the Honorary President of the Scottish Conjurers’ Association.

Besides being a practising magician who has appeared on Scottish and Thames Television, he is an international authority on the history of magic and conjuring and in 1971 received the Stanley Collins Memorial Award from the USA in recognition of his contributions to this field of endeavour. His regular essays in the history of conjuring are a popular feature of the Magic Circle’s journal, Magic Circular.

He possesses a library of some four thousand volumes dealing with conjuring and the allied arts, an extensive collection of engravings, playbills, posters and programmes relating to conjurers, and a large collection of antique conjuring equipment dating from the last century.

Contents (Chapters from book ToC, updated Feb 2019):

6 Illustrations
8 Introduction and Acknowledgements
11 In the Beginning
26 The Learned Animals
35 Bags, Bubbles and Bottles
52 The Phenomena
61 The Conjuring Quacks
71 Laughing Gas
83 Phantasmagoric Professors
93 The Jewish Connexion
108 Wizards From the North
121 Science et la Prestidigitation
131 They Also Conjured
141 Egypt and the Sphinx
155 Maskelyne & Cooke – Royal Illusionists
169 The Great Gun Trick
184 Sounds, Shadows & Shackles
203 Epiloque
204 Reference & Notes
212 Index

• Publisher: Chartwell Books Inc.
• Pages: 216
• Location: Secaucus, New Jersey, USA
• Dimensions: 8″x10″
• Date: 1979
• Binding: hardbound

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