Modern Magic: A Practical Treatise on the Art of Conjuring

Some drawer-boxes have a different arrangement for holding back the inner drawer, consisting of a little wire bolt lying loosely in a cylindrical cavity in the hinder end of b, corresponding with a similar cavity in the side of the outer case. As long as the drawer-box is kept in its normal position, this pin offers no obstacle to the withdrawal of b with a; but if the box be turned over on the side in which is the bolt, the latter drops partially into the hole in the outer case, thus bolting b to it, until, by again turning over the apparatus, the bolt is made to drop back again into its original position. The arrangement is rather difficult to explain in writing, but will become quite clear upon an examination of Figs. 172 and 173, both representing a section of the hinder end of the drawer-box, the one in its upright and the one in its turned-over position. The necessary turning over of the box is plausibly accounted for by the performer’s desire that the audience shall, for greater fairness, have a full view of the top of the apparatus. There is an ingenious addition sometimes found in drawer-boxes of French make, whereby b may be at pleasure bolted to a, and the two may thus be handed for examination, with little chance of their secret being detected. The bolting and unbolting is effected by a slight movement up or down of the knob in front, thereby raising or depressing a kind of hook of bent tin, working in the thickness of the front of a. Fig. 174 shows this hook in its raised or unhooked, and Fig. 175 in its depressed or hooked condition.