This is sort of an open fan letter.
I first saw a reference to Roberto Giobbi's book "Secret Agenda" somewhere in this forum and thought it sounded interesting, so I looked up a copy and got it. For those of you NOT familiar with the book and its concept, it is a series of 366 short chapters arranged by months and days to provide one short chapter per day (including one for a leap-year) to read on some topic that Giobbi feels is relevant to magic.
I think it would be fairer to say "relevant to one's development as a magician" since a number of the topics *appear* to have no real connection to magic per se.
First of all, I think this book, like everything I have bought from the Hermetic Press is really gorgeous. It's beautifully produced, well made and sturdy. Nice typeface on high quality paper. Really nice binding. I LOVE owning books like this, and think they are worth paying up for.
Second, there is a LOT of really interesting magic stuff in this book, little tricks using just the fingers of your two hands, ingenious lifts and techniques for getting a break, and hints on new ways to think about individual techniques that allow you to map out loads of other applications, making a technique into a swiss army knife of applications.
In the third place, there is the stuff that appears NOT to be related to magic. I have seen several people write about these with a hint of puzzlement about how they made their way into the book at all. All I can say is that, whatever Giobbi has to say, it is ALL really interesting, and, although it may not bear directly on the technicalities of magic, it always bears on the psychology, on what has been referred to in the most recent Cirrus train-wreck, er, I mean thread, as "entertainment".
If, in fact, magic is a *performing* art, then it has to, if not entertain, then at least "interest" the spectator. The spectator can't walk away feeling bored or annoyed, or as if he has just been belittled, but rather, he or she must feel that something really cool has just happened in front of them, and, even better, has been done just for them. It's possible to split hairs about whether you would call this "entertainment" or not, but it is certainly more than just executing techniques in front of people.
So, for me, this additional material is the real payoff of the book. Getting to have an insight into more than the effect but into the thinking that is going on behind the effect. It leaves me thinking that Roberto Giobbi would be a really cool person to have a cup of coffee and an hour's good talk with.