After giving it a lot of thought, here's the Jolly Almanac of Card Knavery, a 240ish page PDF for learning card magic, available for free.

https://theburnabykid.com/nwmb/2018/10/1......knavery/

Inside are 12 chapters of material, including dozens of techniques, over 70 tricks, and essays about magic theory.

I'm distributing it under a creative commons license (more details within the PDF itself in the book's Introduction). There are some relevant terms in there involving how to share this with others, but otherwise, if you want to download the PDF and start learning, it's available for free.

Hope you guys have had a good weekend!

This is a full course. I love it. It is great to compare and contrast between different sources to pick up things that work better for you and your style. Thanks so much!!! Other magi, chime in.

For those uninitiated with The Burnaby Kid, he was once a frequent, and valuable, contributor here on the Café. He took a sabbatical from the big green monster but now he's back--and I, for one, couldn't be happier about that. He offers an intelligent, articulate point-of-view that doesn't need to beat people over the head, as the arguments speak for themselves.

As for the generous .pdf, it covers card handling basics and works its way up to tricks a beginner in sleight-of-hand can do. And the tricks are GOOD (see: Design for Laughter) It's a great introduction to the topic of card magic and if it serves its intended purpose, will act as a gateway drug to the wider world of sleight-of-hand card magic.

Missed you, Andrew! If you ever decide go slumming south of the border and find yourself in or near Washington, DC, give me shout. First round is on me!

I'll echo Steven Keyl:

> [Andrew] offers an intelligent, articulate point-of-view that doesn't need to beat people over the head

Thanks Andrew!

Andrew, is this available as an actual book as opposed to an e-book? Also, is this your annotation of Royal Road?
It sounds very interesting. I'd love to purchase a physical copy if it is available.

This afternoon/evening I had time to take a good look at Andrew's pdf. If you're really interested in card magic. There is so much good stuff in Andrew's work!
It's a freebee. So what? He's honest enough to make such an effort free to the public, since most of it is based of the labour of love of other people (fully credited). His merit is that he took the (in his opinion) best parts, filtered them through his experience and knowledge.

I'm not new to card magic, quite the opposite, but I am going to cherish Andrew's work as much as I've cherished Giobbi's Card College and Introduction to Card Magic (another must) and, of course, Royal Road To Card Magic and Expert Card Technique, which was THE book that kept me company during my military service in 1986-1987..

Mark

I respectfully submit that in this day and age indeed free teachings online do attract more people to pursue their interest in magic. It's a new world with ever changing new technologies and new mindsets. And for better or worse "free on the internet" is a very prominent mindset.

This work is worlds better than the free garbage which many of the kids discover and start from on youtube and reddit. And that is exactly where these kids are, in the cyber world looking to see if magic is interesting enough to them to maybe put some work into learning to perform a trick. Frankly, if kids are going to mine for free magic to get started, I'd rather they have a good resource rather than the horrible stuff which is also available out there.

Andrew,

I really appreciate your taking the time to offer something back to the community.

I wasn't aware of your blog until recently and really enjoyed reading some of your previous posts.

I'm in the market for an excellent "beginners magic book" for my ten year old daughter and will certainly pick up Kaufman's "Knack Magic", Josh Jay's "Magic: The Complete Course" and encourage her to read the big Mark Wilson book (which we already own).

Thanks for sharing this.

Thanks, guys. A few things...

The current URL doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, so I set up a redirect on the website. You can access the PDF here: https://theburnabykid.com/JACK . Please let me know if there are any issues.

Since there's some concern about me giving this stuff for free... When you take away my own (few) tricks, the outsourced images, the magic theory essays, and the editing work done by a very intelligent young man who needs to inform me which name he would prefer to go by (heh heh), this is really an anthology of material that lives in the public domain and which can basically be attained for free already (through archive.org, askalexander.org, themagicwiki.com, lybrary.com, the Victoria State Library in Australia, etc.). When it comes to JACK, I'm less a writer of a book than I am a curator of an anthology. In some ways that made the job easier, but in others, much, much harder.

There's credit within the book, but just in case it doesn't jump out, the cover owes a great debt to Chris Aguilar for the card image. Thanks for that, Chris. And don't think I didn't see what you also did there, you rascal.

Steven made mention of my time away from the Café. Truth be told, up until a few months ago I'd actually been taking a break from the magic community as a whole (with the exception of Reddit... I don't have a good excuse for that, so I won't insult your intelligence with a bad one). I've been trying to change the direction of my life, and that includes not indulging in the sort of mayhem that I might have in the past. You may think of this as penance. Some might think that 240 pages represents overkill in that regard, but I suspect they've got penance envy.

At the moment there is no plan on putting out a print version. However, I may put up a PDF that has proper book margins so that people can create their own through one of the various Print on Demand services out there. That may change. Right now, though, I'm taking a break. The book represents about a year and a half of hard work, and I currently have way too many brain cells in my head and a perfectly good liver to ruin.

I will echo that it is good to see you back. Also, thanks for that great gift in the form of a "free" ebook. I look forward to reading thru it.

Great gift to the community, Andrew. Thanks.

Do you have a preferred way to let people report back on typos? For example on page 14 you refer to paragraph 1.1.5, when it should be 1.2.5.

At some point, if you have time, to make this even more useful to readers, it would be nice to have videos illustrating some of the moves. They don't have to be (any or all) from you. You could accept contributions and choose the ones you like best. I'd be happy to contribute one for the Lift Shuffle Force (which is great and deceptive, there, I've said it!).

One last point, for some reason the pdf is not fully searchable. If I search for 'lift shuffle', I get nothing.

Regarding typos, however you want to let me know is fine. There may be a few as, against my editor's wishes, I rushed to release rather than wait and go through a final edit. I suspect when it comes to typos that he'll be as pleased as a cat in a bathtub.

The PDF itself was produced using software that's meant to make it ready for a printing press rather than for consumption via computers. Given that I've made the choice to have this be primarily consumed via computer, the decision to render it that way is probably about as dumb as not having bandaids stocked when you want to give your cat a bath.

There are a few ideas I've had for adding to this. Videos (demonstration rather than explanation) are one. I'm going to wait before pursuing that, for the moment. I've blown my entire budget on this both in terms of time and money. Besides, I suspect it's going to take a while to deal with the really, really angry cat in the loo.

Interesting read BK.

In your analyses of 3 cards across, you suggest moving the selection phase to the middle.
I would suggest withholding just their REVEAL until the middle. I personally prefer to get the dirty-stuff over with as soon as possible to give some time-lapse and keep the flow.

Can you clarify that? Are you talking about revealing their selected card in the middle?

Yes. That's similar to the RR presentation. "Have him place card in pocket without looking at it."
The prepped f*rce is of course antiquated, and relying on the classic-force mid routine smells dangerous.

Ah k. I go through this in more detail in the book, but briefly, there are two main advantages and one minor disadvantage to moving the entirety of the selection to the middle.

Advantage #1: By putting the selection later, you do not touch their pile at any time after they select the card. Since the nature of the change to their pile correlates to the selection they've just made, this is an added level of mystery.

Advantage #2: Audiences tend to know that the trick has started once a card is selected, and once they know the trick has started, all proceedings thereafter tend to get more scrutiny. By starting with counting out a pile of cards, you're giving people very little to go on, putting the riskiest part of the trick at a point of less-focused attention.

Disadvantage: There's a larger time gap between the initial counting of the pile and the final counting of the pile. This is not a trivial issue, since we need to maintain their belief in the number of cards in order for the surprise to be strong. My technique for dealing with this is in the book.

This is arguably theoretical, but it's based upon my experience performing the trick both ways and observing the differences.

Andrew,

What a gift you have given to newcomers to the art! I think most of us can identify with the pain we had when we started out of acquiring good material to help us on our journey. You've eased their burden significantly. Well done man!!

Best,
Vlad