Modern Magic: A Practical Treatise on the Art of Conjuring

Peck & Snyder, 124 Nassau Street, New York City, are the largest manufacturers, importers, and dealers in sports, pastimes, and trick materials. They will forward illustrated catalogues on application, giving details of an infinite variety of Optical, Chemical, Mechanical, Magnetical, and Magical Experiments, and ingenious deceptions. Supplementary sheets are issued from time to time, giving descriptions of new novelties. One peculiarity of their business is that every purchaser is taught, by the very explicit instructions that accompany each article and by correspondence, to perform whatever Tricks he may buy, so that he may exhibit them with ease and without fear of detection, and no trouble is spared in order to make him perfect in what he purchases. Prices are generally low: where a seemingly high price occurs the professor or skilled amateur will readily realize that it is occasioned by the elaborateness of the mechanism of the particular apparatus desired, and the cost that such precision in manipulative manufacture involves. The purchaser--we speak from personal experience--can always depend on receiving uniform courtesy, good value, and sound practical instruction. The novice must be warned against imagining that, when he has got into the region of apparatus, the necessity for personal address and dexterity will be diminished. On the contrary, there is hardly a trick among those we are about to describe which does not demand more or less practical knowledge of sleight-of-hand. We shall assume, in the following pages, that the reader has carefully followed and studied the directions already given, in which case he will find little difficulty in this portion of the work.