Sleight of Hand: A Practical Manual of Legerdemain for Amateurs & Others

In an age when magic was migrating from smoky tavern stages to glittering Victorian parlors, Edwin Sachs wrote the definitive guide to making impossible things happen in your own hands. This is not a book of tricks with punchlines. It is a rigorous apprenticeship in legerdemain - the art of making the eye believe what the hand has done. Sachs begins where all magic truly begins: with the question of why we crave being fooled. He explores the psychology of wonder, then immediately turns to the painstaking physical training that makes wonder possible. From palming a coin so naturally your own grandmother would swear it vanished, to the intricate manipulations of cups and balls, to card techniques that still bear his influence a century later, Sachs treats conjuring as a serious art requiring serious practice. This is the manual that generations of professionals have turned to when they needed to understand not just how a trick works, but why it works on a human being standing three feet away, desperately wanting to believe.