Sam Dalal – India’s U.F. Grant

To many of the magic collectors that visit my site the name “Sam Dalal” is synonymous with “cheap Indian magic imports” – this is certainly how I felt about the name until about about five years ago when I began my History Project. But once I started researching more I realized how much Sam has contributed to magic 🙂

To me Sam is more like India’s U.F. Grant. Sam has invented 100’s of effects, and published dozens of articles in magazines including: Abra, Magigram, the New Pentagram, Linking Ring, Bascom Jones’ Magick. Sam also ran two successful magazines of his own for about five years: Swami and Mantra. Sam told me that he stopped contributing articles to the magazines in the mid 70’s because he started manufacturing and selling them through his own business: Funtime Innovations (formerly Electro Fun).

He has published dozens of books (many of which are available in e-book form from Lybrary.com), authored 1000’s of instruction sheets and manuals for his company and runs perhaps the largest magic manufacturer and distributor in the world: Funtime Innovations. Many of his original ideas have now been collated in a series of Sam’s Scrapbooks, published by Lybrary.com. At its peak Funtime was employing 300 craftsmen – which is considerably larger than any magic business I have ever heard of in America or Europe.

What I also found fascinating is that many of Sam’s items have been the ones that were copied and often ripped off. Prime examples are his clever ideas with poker chips that were copied and modified by others without once giving credit to the man who started the trend with his Rainbow Chips, Super Psychic Chips, and Magician at The Casino in the 1970’s.

In my own personal correspondence with Sam he has been very generous with his time and clearly loves magic. When I asked him about the more common and less expensive items he sells his response was:

As a “magic addict”, I love the high end stuff, and as a “businessman” I produced what was required.

Well with 300 craftsmen employed you can’t argue with that logic 🙂

Below are just a few of Sam’s of products, you can see a fuller list here.