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Authors: Enrique de Hériz
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overheard. Besides, I was talking about something else.’
‘It doesn’t matter now. You know why it didn’t bother me? Because I was holding a copy of Hoffmann’s book. You’d just given it to me so I could practise forcing a card. I didn’t know how important it was, but I had the feeling you had just given me the road map to my whole life. At the time, that was all I needed.’
‘And you pulled it off, congratulations.’
‘But it’s not enough. Now, I need a different map. I have to think about the future. About the immediate future, because this thing is moving fast. I have to start planning for the future that will be here before I know it. Instead, I seem to be spending my days thinking about the past. I’ve been dreaming about my father. I’ve been thinking about Peter Grouse, about Kellar. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the first time you and I met. I feel as if I’m locked inside the Proteus Cabinet, surrounded by mirrors, about to change into a spirit.’
‘A spirit? Well, I always did predict great things for you,’ Galván tried to inject a note of humour. ‘If you like, we can convene the Seybert Commission.’
‘Don’t fuck around, Mario, this is serious.’
A Line of Fire
H offmann? The most important thing is that you master his work, that you practise it until your hands hurt, but I’ll tell you who he was. A little history never goes amiss. Professor Hoffmann’s name was not Hoffmann and he was never a professor of anything. He was Angelo John Lewis, attorney. As a magician, he’s not worth even a passing mention in a footnote in the appendix of any specialist reference book. But it would be impossible to write a history of magic without citing 1876, the date
Modern Magic
was first published in Philadelphia, as a fundamental watershed.
We know very little about him. He learned magic as a child, but there’s no record that he ever performed in public and there’s no way to know whether it was crippling shyness that stopped him, or lack of talent. He also liked to write so he decided to combine these two passions and set down everything he knew about the magician’s art of his time. What is most surprising is how much he knew, because besides documenting tricks and techniques that had not changed for centuries, beyond the aesthetic changes imposed by fashion,
Modern Magic
also gave an incredibly detailed account of the latest advances in the profession. And we are not talking about sleight of hand, where techniques could be worked out by logic and intuition. We are talking about sheer engineering, illusions so impressive their inventors could sell out the biggest theatres in the world for months on end.
The public of the day adored two illusions in particular: disappearances and levitation. Every magician racked his brains – or paid someone to do it for him – to find some way of making increasingly bigger objects or creatures disappear as the audiencewatched. As for levitation, a skilled engineer could become a millionaire if he could find a way of fitting everyday objects – chairs, tables, beds, carpets – with an undetectable mechanism that could ‘levitate’ a magician’s assistant for a while. Turn on the television today and it’s clear that the passion for these illusions has not died and that a number of magicians have the nerve to perform levitation tricks using the same contraptions described by Hoffmann in the chapter ‘Suspension in the Air’.
After publishing
Modern Magic
the bogus professor had to vanish for a while. Had he not done so he might have been killed. It may seem surprising, but the magicians of the day didn’t pull their punches when it came to protecting their secrets. Cases of extortion, bribery, industrial espionage and the outright theft of tricks were not uncommon. Intellectual property over devices and contraptions was so jealously guarded that simply changing a nail or a screw would send someone rushing to the
‘It doesn’t matter now. You know why it didn’t bother me? Because I was holding a copy of Hoffmann’s book. You’d just given it to me so I could practise forcing a card. I didn’t know how important it was, but I had the feeling you had just given me the road map to my whole life. At the time, that was all I needed.’
‘And you pulled it off, congratulations.’
‘But it’s not enough. Now, I need a different map. I have to think about the future. About the immediate future, because this thing is moving fast. I have to start planning for the future that will be here before I know it. Instead, I seem to be spending my days thinking about the past. I’ve been dreaming about my father. I’ve been thinking about Peter Grouse, about Kellar. Not a day goes by that I don’t think about the first time you and I met. I feel as if I’m locked inside the Proteus Cabinet, surrounded by mirrors, about to change into a spirit.’
‘A spirit? Well, I always did predict great things for you,’ Galván tried to inject a note of humour. ‘If you like, we can convene the Seybert Commission.’
‘Don’t fuck around, Mario, this is serious.’
A Line of Fire
H offmann? The most important thing is that you master his work, that you practise it until your hands hurt, but I’ll tell you who he was. A little history never goes amiss. Professor Hoffmann’s name was not Hoffmann and he was never a professor of anything. He was Angelo John Lewis, attorney. As a magician, he’s not worth even a passing mention in a footnote in the appendix of any specialist reference book. But it would be impossible to write a history of magic without citing 1876, the date
Modern Magic
was first published in Philadelphia, as a fundamental watershed.
We know very little about him. He learned magic as a child, but there’s no record that he ever performed in public and there’s no way to know whether it was crippling shyness that stopped him, or lack of talent. He also liked to write so he decided to combine these two passions and set down everything he knew about the magician’s art of his time. What is most surprising is how much he knew, because besides documenting tricks and techniques that had not changed for centuries, beyond the aesthetic changes imposed by fashion,
Modern Magic
also gave an incredibly detailed account of the latest advances in the profession. And we are not talking about sleight of hand, where techniques could be worked out by logic and intuition. We are talking about sheer engineering, illusions so impressive their inventors could sell out the biggest theatres in the world for months on end.
The public of the day adored two illusions in particular: disappearances and levitation. Every magician racked his brains – or paid someone to do it for him – to find some way of making increasingly bigger objects or creatures disappear as the audiencewatched. As for levitation, a skilled engineer could become a millionaire if he could find a way of fitting everyday objects – chairs, tables, beds, carpets – with an undetectable mechanism that could ‘levitate’ a magician’s assistant for a while. Turn on the television today and it’s clear that the passion for these illusions has not died and that a number of magicians have the nerve to perform levitation tricks using the same contraptions described by Hoffmann in the chapter ‘Suspension in the Air’.
After publishing
Modern Magic
the bogus professor had to vanish for a while. Had he not done so he might have been killed. It may seem surprising, but the magicians of the day didn’t pull their punches when it came to protecting their secrets. Cases of extortion, bribery, industrial espionage and the outright theft of tricks were not uncommon. Intellectual property over devices and contraptions was so jealously guarded that simply changing a nail or a screw would send someone rushing to the
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