Jessie Eisenberg is interviewed by Andrei Jikh of theory11 about his upcoming role in Now You See Me. While the questions are good, the best part comes later in the interview when Andrei performs some of his unique cardistry for Jesse.
Columnist Michael Lauck explains everything you need to know about beginning a collection of magic tokens…
Not only are magic tokens a real piece of history, they are also the last affordable magic collectable.
You can start collecting tokens today with the cash you have in your pocket. Today we’ll cover everything you need to get started.
Over the last few decades most magic collectables, such as vintage props and genuine advertising posters, have become insanely expensive. Worse yet, there are many reproduction pieces available now, particularly in the world of posters, making it even harder to find legitimate vintage pieces. As I mentioned in my last article, magic tokens have the virtue of being a kind of cross between posters, with their beautiful images, and props, which were actually used by yesterday’s magicians. Granted, they are not quite as impressive as a vintage head chopper or a twice life sized poster announcing the show it takes 15 boxcars to move, but who honestly has the space for that kind of stuff? Tokens have the real usefulness of props and the beautiful imagery of posters, albeit on a smaller scale, but they also demand a much smaller price and they are easier to display. There are also very few, if any, counterfeits.
You can find magic tokens many different places. As I mentioned in the last article, there are many types of non-magical tokens and they are actively traded and collected by many people. Antique and coin collectors call non-monetary coin-like objects exonumia (kind of the metal version of ephemera). Most token collectors are attracted to a specific subject and people are looking for everything from state tax tokens to complimentary beer chits, old casino chips to pure advertising pieces. This wide variety of collectors makes it worth it for many antique and coin shops to buy up tokens when they can, but it makes them hard to be sure of their value. Many tokens were produced by the hundreds, and some in the thousands, and most were made of cheap materials (like “German silver,” which is not silver but a copper-nickel alloy, and its super-vaguely named cousin “white metal”) so they have very little inherent value. All of this means that if you are willing to do some legwork you can find great deals on tokens at flea markets, antique shops and coin dealers. Of course, many magic dealers will trade in tokens and you can always find them online, too. So getting started is easy; you can start right after you finish this article by heading to ebay!
What should you look for in a token? Part of that is up to you, of course. If you have a specific set of magicians that interest you then start by looking for them. I started buying tokens by accident after I read Steinmeyer’s “The Last Greatest Magician in the World.” In a search for one of Thurston’s books I came across some of his throwing cards and tokens for sale. Obviously, I bought them. Once they arrived I was fascinated by the idea that unlike posters, these were items Thurston actually may have handled. Seriously, how many posters do you think magicians actually touched? I went looking for more cards but have found that tokens were much easier to find and way less expensive. You can also start searching for tokens associated with famous shops or simply look for any magic token under a certain budget. So far I have refused to pay more than $25 for a piece (and that included shipping) and usually I set my budget around $10.
Condition is everything, so if a token is damaged you should expect to pay less and you might want to just skip it entirely. It is good to remember that very few tokens were issued with any kind of hole in them (most that were are based on Chinese coins), but many have had holes punched in them by owners so that they could use them as a charm, keychain ornament or watch fob. These are still considered damaged and should be priced as such. Fakes are generally not an issue, so you don’t need to worry about that, but misidentifications are rampant. Many an arcade token and Mardi Gras doubloon (tokens thrown from floats) featuring a magic hat or wizard are sold as magic tokens. Strictly speaking, this isn’t the case but if you want to add them to your collection, go for it!
How do you tell “legitimate” magic tokens from the Mardi Gras doubloons? Unlike so many other collectable markets, there are not many books on magic tokens. You may find a reference or two in the exonumia section of various coin books but you will not find a Kovel’s Price Guide for magic tokens. By far the best resource is the second part of the October 1978 TAMS (Token and Medal Society) Journal, which is the most complete guide to magic tokens published to date. Although the illustrations are black and white photocopies, many not the actual size, there really has not been another guide to the subject in the intervening years. One thing you may consider to try to learn more about tokens and their values is to monitor ebay and pay attention to the selling price (not the asking price) of tokens. You don’t have to wait for the current auctions to end, either; simply checked the “Completed Auctions” to see the most recent prices.
Let me offer a word of warning about ebay and other online search methods: they require the same patience a trip to a flea market or coin store to dig through the “junk drawer” requires. No matter what search terms are selected you are likely to get a number of markers and tokens sold to devotees of the Magic: The Gathering card game. You can also expect a number of trick coins to show up in your search results as well as tokens that just happen to feature the word magic even though are for car washes, bars or other non-magic related businesses.
Once you start to accumulate tokens you need to know how to care for and display them. According to Kevin King (www.kevking.com), one of today’s premier magic token collectors, pieces should never be cleaned and should be handled as little as possible. He suggests immediately placing any token that comes loose into a folding cardboard coin holder with clear plastic windows. These inexpensive holders are simply folded in half over the token and stapled in place. They can be found online and at many hobby and craft stores. The holders are sized for standard US coins which means the half dollar size will fit most, but not all, tokens (all of the holders in the illustrations are sized for half dollars). Coin holders are the only mandatory supply necessary to maintain a token collection, although you may want to pick up some white cotton inspection gloves to handle unprotected tokens that you receive (because it seems like they really good ebay deals always arrive wrapped in a piece of notebook paper taped to your receipt). If you do not already have one, you also might want to pick up a good magnifier of some type, such as a jeweler’s loupe, to really study the detail on your purchases. If you start to collect seriously then you will probably want to track down a copy of the October 1978 TAMS Journal Part Two, Magic Tokens and Related Items by F. William Kuethe. It is the only true guide to magic tokens even though it is 35 years out of date.
Magic tokens have long been an overlooked part of magic history. Luckily, that means that they are still an affordable way to get into magic collecting (at least for now). You might not ever have a Copperfieldesque secret warehouse loaded with priceless artifacts from the greatest magicians in history, but you can own a drawerful of exonumia that may have been actually handled by them!
iTricks writer Michael Lauck tells you about a magician who told the stories of so many others.
He’s the most influential magician of a generation and you’ve probably never heard of him. He shaped modern magic but if you’ve read his name it’s probably only been in passing.
He created tales of wonder and wrote words that inspired generations. The name on his books alone electrified readers before their were minds blown with what was written inside.
Is it Houdini? Kind of.
Blackstone? A little bit.
Thurston? Yeah, him too.
Might as well throw in a little Joseph Dunninger and even some Mark Wilson, too. I’m not creating a magical Frankenstein, it is one man who has added to all of the magicians listed above and many, many others. The greatest magician you’ve never seen is actually Walter B. Gibson, magician and one of the most prolific authors in the world.
Gibson is best known for writing The Shadow stories under the pseudonym Maxwell Grant. He did not invent the character, who already was on the radio, but instead penned the vast majority of The Shadow’s adventures when the radio show spun off a quarterly pulp magazine (which soon became a monthly and then a biweekly publication). It is easy to forget in our modern age of the Internet and 500 cable channels how popular pulp magazines were in their day. At their peak, there was no Internet, no television, no video games and although radio was around (AM only) sets were heavy, heat producing monsters in small wooden crates.To help understand consider this: when the adventures of The Shadow were collected as novels, there were over 300! No one knows for sure how many of them Walter Gibson wrote (as “Maxwell Grant” got the official byline for all of the stories) but he is credited with at least 275 of them. For two years in the early 1940s, The Shadow had a daily comic strip and it was also written by Gibson.
Even though Gibson’s work on the various incarnations of The Shadow would be more than enough to call his career a success, it is only one aspect of his amazing career. His fiction work includes the novelization of several Twilight Zone stories, a few books in the Biff Brewster children’s adventure series in the 1960s and at least one issue of Batman. In the non-fiction realm Gibson wrote several books on backgammon, pinochle, poker and other games. He also penned books on hypnotism, the history of witchcraft and at least one about knots (and how to tie them). Working with his wife Litzka, he also has several books on psychic sciences and prophecy to his credit. But, as the infomercials say, that’s not all! Walter B. Gibson was probably the most productive magic author in the world.
Even as he was writing something like 10,000 words a day to fill the pages of The Shadow Magazine, Gibson oversaw The Phoenix, a mimeographed bi-weekly newsletter for magicians. It ran from 1942 to 1950 with help from Bruce Elliott (who also wrote a dozen or so stories for The Shadow Magazine over the years). Each edition carried a few tricks (about four, give or take an effect) and perhaps a little commentary. The small number of pages and rather primitive look, even for the standards of the time, made it possible for The Phoenix to stay current with the latest in magic news. They were a far cry from magazines and are probably best likened to a good email newsletter except that each one was hand typed, illustrated, printed, stuffed in envelopes and mailed across the country. The Phoenix is considered by many magicians to be a goldmine of effects and the collection is still available today on CD-Rom.
But wait: there’s more!
Find out how Gibson helped create the images around the most famous magicians in the world including Houdini, Dunninger, Blackstone and Thurston AFTER THE JUMP. (more…)
I would LOVE to see this. Batman Follies of 1929!
It’s a vaudeville style review show comprised totally of Batman characters including many of the rogues gallery. What better? Aussie magician Adam Mada plays Two Face as a “master of coin magic.”
Awesome. Oz locals can click here for the tickets and more information.
It’s the circle of life.
27-year-old UK resident Carl Slattery got married to his wife Vicky last year. They decided to hire a magician, Jason, for the reception. Carl was so blown away and fascinated by Jason’s walk around skills that he decided to take up magic as a hobby, relying on Jason to tutor him on the sleight of hand necessary to become a proper prestidigitator.
“I became interested in having a go myself and Jason was kind enough to work with me, and I found I had an aptitude for it.
“He has mentored and supported me to the point that we have now done a few gigs together.”
And now, roughly a year later, the cycle is complete. Carl booked his own wedding.
The crossover between engineers and magicians isn’t a secret. Nor is the collectors nature of magic community, specifically when it comes to cards.
So we are sure there are quite a few folks, maybe even a few reading this post, that recognize the deck above and have it amongst the rest of their decks. According to The Verge, it’s the custom deck of cards employees of Palm received for the launch of the Palm Pre. According to the excellent article, this was the beginning of the end for the venerable tech warhorse as it rapidly descended into obscurity.
If you like tech, or enjoy epic tales of fortunes won and lost, read the whole story here.
The hilarious Laurence Leung was commissioned by Australian radio station triplej to create a few magic videos to promote their Hottest 100 vote and countdown. Leung recruited Simon Coronel to devise and perform four close-up clips which are explicitly performed without camera cuts or CGI.
Click AFTER THE JUMP to see the rest… (more…)
