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I think you can rely on Conjuring Arts (Bill Kalush et al) to respect copyright and only publish works they have a right to publish. You should feel no qualms about downloading it. Not even a small qualm.

That's absolutely true. My advice was more centred around facing up to the problem and learning to handle it rather than trying to make it go away, though. I think it's a useful skill to learn to "play any room", i.e. learn to step up in front of any group (teenage jerks, Fortune 500 CEOs...

That could be true but, on the other hand CJ might have the intelligence to realise that school isn't exactly like real life in all respects, and that the jerk-ratio he might experience there won't be reflected in adult life, and to differentiate between interactions with friends and...

A lot of very wise and experienced people recommend not performing at school. On the other hand, a lot of very wise and experience people say, "do as many shows as you possibly can" (a Lance Burton phrase originally, I believe). I think of it like this. When you leave school, do you want...

Ah, I see, thanks!

Out of interest, what does 793.8 mean?

The Through the Fist flourish could work instead of the Twirl Change. Or, if you were able to misdirect for a moment, you could use a Deck Flip or the Flippant move to turn the packet over. Then bring attention back to the packet, perform the twisting action from Dai Vernon's original routine...

I think this really suffers from being performed in silence. It makes it quite difficult to follow what's going on at times. For example, when you did the Twirl Change, were we supposed to realise that the packet was turning over or was that action meant to be hidden? What was the effect, that...

That's pretty much the going rate. If you shop around you might be able to get a slightly cheaper copy, but not by much.

This could be very exciting indeed. If there's anything I can do to help make this happen let me know!

That's a fairly typical style of nineteenth and early twentieth-century writing, even for a single writer. And it's still used today in a lot of academic papers. It's known as the "authorial 'we'". Although, there are many examples through history of groups combining to write under a shared...

I'm not exactly a performing mentalist, but I'm a student of the theory of mentalism as a performance art, and of various mentalism-related skills like hypnosis, cold reading and intuition. If that counts, then count me in!

If you wanted to build a case that Erdnase was written by a woman (or by several people, at least one of whom was a woman) then there are some details that could be interpreted that way. Nothing conclusive but enough to put together the foundations of an argument. I'll leave you to find them if...

Drake (the publisher who held the rights to the text for several years) told a correspondent of Dai Vernon's, John Sprong, that the name was a pseudonym. Depending on which retelling of the story you listen to, Sprong was simply told that the name was an anagram, explicitly that it was a...

Every performer's different and this may work for you and your performance character, but I can't quite see it. This approach says, "I'm cleverer than you". Maybe that's what you want to convey, in which case, go for it. If someone says to me, "I know how that's done", I prefer to say, with a...

When you say "know", do you mean "know of", or "can perform"? I know of about two hundred different shift variants, I can execute maybe fifty or so to some extent, but the ones that I would consider using in front of people are: 1. Classic pass (various handlings: riffle, dribble, etc.) 2...

Not really. Some of the best sleight-of-hand performers around have very small hands. To be fair, some of the worst sleight-of-hand artists have very small hands too, and cite the size of their hands as the reason why their performance of certain moves is below par. All this leads me to believe...

Short answer: No. It's an effect that (to the best of my knowledge) was created by Dynamo and his consultants for his show, and I think it's very unlikely to be sold anytime soon given that it's one of his most famous pieces.

The best magic square presentation I've seen is Derren Brown's in his first stage show. He quoted some spurious research that certain personality types would be drawn to certain numbers. As the newspaper you buy says a lot about your personality, people who read the same newspaper tend to be...

Oh, cool! That's a bit exciting. Thanks very much to Theory 11 and Fate for my win!