So will a book like this ever happen? I'm guessing you're still too prolific to cap it off now...but I'd love to own this book...

A complete compendium of my published work would, quite frankly, be a bad idea. I've never deliberately published anything I'd consider bad, but some of what I have put in print is rather ephemeral -- a nice idea that could generate something better and hence is worth putting into a magazine, but not preserving between hard covers.

One of the extraordinary things about "Stewart James: The First Fifty Years" was that it contained about 400 items -- everything Stewart had published in that half-century span, plus some unpublished material. And not every one of those items was knock-out (although many, many of them were), but not a single one wasted your time. Some of the tricks you might perform, or use as a springboard to something else, and with some you'd simply learn something about structure or framing. But every page in that huge book has value.

I've published far more tricks (I think it's around 1800 by now), but have held to a lower standard.

Hello, Max,

I think that PRISM is an excellent book all around. One time I went to my IBM Ring meeting with the intention of performing your version of Prophecy Pack, Predixtion, and one guy there stole my thunder by performing the original Prophecy Pack routine I learned.

I like the way you weave words together in your routines, taking your sweet time to bring everything to a conclusion. It's much more theatrical than just, "Boom!" here's your card. Thanks for being so cool.

CSR

Lets talk about Focus.What are your favorite tricks in this book you still perform all the time.

It was hard enough narrowing it down to sixty, so I won't try to pick individual favorites. Every item in that book is one that I like, and most of them were staples of my close-up repertoire at one time or another.