The Best-Selling Magic Books Ever
By Damian Jennings - Friday, May 21, 2021
We’ve been publishing magic books for over ten years and pride ourselves on being the largest publisher of magic books in the world. This is a list of the top ten magic books we’ve sold over the last ten years. They’re not all published by us, but you can be sure that every single book here is well worthy of your consideration. Let’s dive in!
Parlour Tricks
By Morgan and West
Books devoted specifically to parlor magic are few and far between. Morgan and West are two English magicians who perform as Victorian time-travelers. They’re extremely funny, but also amazingly fooling. They work incredibly hard to achieve their miracles as this book details. And what details they are. You receive all the work on their full evening show, also named Parlour Tricks. It’s a dissection of this 90 minute show. Sure, they explain the tricks, but also every other detail. The lighting, the sound, how backstage is set up, why they do the tricks they do and full scripts of every effect. It’s also peppered with thoughtful essays. The book is essentially a masterclass for creating your own evening show.
Buy Parlour Tricks
Pure Imagination
By Andi Gladwin, John Campbell and Scott Robinson
If you’re a fan of interesting, visual close-up magic then this book is a must-read. The magic contained within this lush and beautiful book is an unusual mixture of visual, fooling and entertaining. Over 304 pages, Andi Gladwin and John Campbell describe 46 of Robinson’s most treasured creations. It’s one man’s life’s work. Many of these routines have been worked in over 20 years of performing, and it shows. The nuances and wrinkles are perfectly thought out and clearly explained. His impromptu Invisible Deck routine is worth the price of admission alone! There’s a healthy mixture of self-working magic, along with simple methods. And if you want something to practise, there’s also a couple of knuckle-busters in here too. This is a worthy, and gorgeous addition to your library.
Buy Pure Imagination
The Boy Who Cried Magic
By Andi Gladwin
What can we say about this book that’s not already been said? For years, Josh has been begging Andi to finally publish a book of his own material. Andi kept saying the next book he does will be his. And it never happened. Until now.
The Boy Who Cried Magic is Andi’s professional act. There’s sixteen tricks and fifteen new sleights. And every single one of them has been worked though during hundreds or even thousands of shows. Moves such as the Master Pushoff and Undo Cut are used by professional magicians all over the world. There’s no question, this is the most beautiful magic book we’ve ever produced. The slip case, the photos, the glossy paper and the layout combine to make this into a wholly stunning book. And the contents are exactly what you’d expect from Mr Gladwin. Thoughtfully written, workable material.
Buy The Boy Who Cried Magic
The Magic Rainbow
By Juan Tamariz
It’s The Maestro! That alone was enough for many to buy this sight unseen. Juan Tamariz has over 40 years experience performing his incredible style of magic. He’s written this amazing book to help magicians elevate their magic to new heights. Almost every magician in the world considers Tamariz to be the best. And this book only confirms that.
This book will teach you to create amazement, wonder and fascination. To make your audience believe that what they saw actually had to have happened.
Teaching techniques to remove the memories of your audience, making backtracking impossible, Tamariz also shares ways to implant wholly false memories - but ones your audience will swear actually happened.
This is the most important book Tamariz has created for magicians. It’s simply essential reading.
Buy The Magic Rainbow
The Darkest Corners
By Ben Hart and Neil Kelso
British magician Ben Hart stormed into the public eye after his appearances on Britain’s Got Talent. He captured the imagination of the nation. This is not your average magic book. It’s a collection of audience-tested parlor routines taken directly from Ben’s working repertoire. Hart takes classic magic effects and completely changes them through his unquestionable story-telling skills and demand for practical, yet stunning methods.
Every show Ben Hart has run at the famous Edinburgh Fringe Festival has completely sold out, and this book can be thought of as a Best Of from those sell out shows. There’s no pipe dreams here. Every moment, every beat of every effect in here has been painstakingly worked out and is described in wonderful detail.
If you want to take your parlor magic to the next level, this is the book for you.
Buy The Darkest Corners
Principia
By Harapan Ong
Singapore sensation, Harapan Ong, burst onto the magic scene initially on social media where he amassed a huge following of people thrilled by his creative, unusual, visual card magic. The kid has chops, no doubt, and this book is full of magic that you will actually find impossible not to try out.
Ong is a physics teacher by day, and this book is designed to mimic a physics book. Its layout is beautiful. But the contents? Well it’s a marvelous mixture of impromptu card magic you can do FASDIU, packet tricks, effects with gimmicks and gaffs (all included) and tricks that you can do after you’ve read the instructions once. Many of the concepts and ideas in here are revolutionary, and we’re so sure you’ll love this book, we’ll happily give you your money back if you don’t!
Buy Principia
The Books Of Wonder 1 and 2
By Tommy Wonder and Stephen Minch
In our blog series My Favorite Magic Books, where we ask magicians, unsurprisingly, to write about their favorite magic books, this comes up more than any other tome. It’s a more than two books, it’s a manifesto declaring magic to be a true artform.
Wonder essentially is providing a blueprint for his brand of theatrical magic which is wholly uncompromising in every way. And along the way, he explains in amazing details his professional close-up, stand-up, walkabout and stage acts.
The two volumes are beautifully produced and contain around 340 pages each and feature 630 stunning illustrations from Kelly Lyles. If you don’t have this already, you need it. It’s that simple.
Buy The Books Of Wonder
Distilled
By Ryan Plunkett
Plunkett spends most of his evenings performing at The Chicago Magic Lounge. During this time, he’s developed material that has been thoroughly audience-tested and this book is the distillation of the thousands of hours of flight time that amazing venue has given him.
This 200 page book gives you ten routines that Ryan has tweaked and improved to generate maximum audience impact. There are classics, with a twist, such as his wonderful ACAAN and new, unusual plots like Fan Mail where a freely selected card matches a card found in a letter from a fan. My favorite is Gravity Deck, which is an unusual vanish of a deck of cards which is held by a spectator. And the spectator actually feels the box get lighter as the deck disappears.
Distilled is a collection worthy of close study.
Buy Distilled
Calculated Thoughts
By Doug Dyment
Dyment has been referred to as “mentalism’s best kept secret” by none other than Ken Weber. And reading the pages of his magnus opus you’ll quickly see why. This 400 page book is full to the brim with audience-tested, creative, knock-out mentalism.
For me, his center tear, Quatro, is the perfect center tear. But the book also has much more. The real work on Magic Squares, a new method to mark Bicycle playing cards, and impromptu divination of a star sign, and even a memory aid that uses your feet!
This is the accumulation of a lifetime’s work in mentalism. It comes with our highest recommendation.
Buy Calculated Thoughts
Rubinstein Coin Magic
By Dr Michael Rubinstein
This is a 500 page book containing Dr Rubinstein’s life’s work. There’s 20 chapters and 50 brand new techniques. 90 full routines described in beautiful, clear detail aided by 930 photographs.
This isn’t just the worker material Michael has been performing over the last 50 years, but also brand new methods and techniques that have never been published before.
There are also contributions from the world’s finest coin magicians, setting this to really be a modern Bobo’s. It will become a classic of coin magic and become the yard stick for all new coin magic books to be measured against.
Buy Rubenstein Coin Magic
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