The Books of Wonder

by Tommy Wonder, Stephen Minch, Kelly Lyles (Illustrator)

Never has there been a more articulate manifesto declaring magic a true art. And never has one man offered a more detailed and coherent plan for achieving art by the practice of magic.

Through a series of tricks, routines and essays, Tommy Wonder provides a clear blueprint for an uncompromising brand of magical theater. Along the way he explains his professional routines for Close-up. Stand-up, Walk-around and Stage.

Among them are...The Updated Two Cup Routine; Watch in Nest of Boxes, 3 methods; Wild Card Tamed; The Watch, the Ring & the Wallet; The Well-tempered Birdcage; and 50 other card tricks, routines and sleights.

The Books of Wonder is a set of two luxuriously produced, matched volumes, each containing approximately 340 pages of extraordinary material with 630 professional illustrations by Kelly Lyles.

Genres: Magic

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1996

Reviews

[David Groves]

This is clearly an excellent book, although by no means infallible. Some hold this up as the best magic book of all time, and if that's true, the bar in this field is not high. This book brings up some fascinating subjects, although it sometimes wallows in the basics for pages on end. John Wooden, the famed college basketball coach, famously led his teams to national championships by going back to basics, and there is something to be said for this with Tommy Wonder's approach. However, for the most part, there were some stretches where I, a 24-year professional magician, was bored. And skipped.

Of course, Wonder is famous for going to extreme lengths to achieve his effects, and the second book (which I read here) contains some of those effects, most notably, the Watch in Nest of Boxes. Wonder goes to such ridiculous lengths to construct a Rube Goldberg device to solve one nearly undetectable flaw in this trick that it has become, in many people's minds, The Apotheosis of Impractical Tricks. Nobody that I know has ever built one of these contraptions, because it would take months and even years. There is nothing you can buy off the shelf to buy this monster. And after it's all built, it won't even be a perfect solution. Wonder himself confesses in this book that in creating solutions to this so-called "problem," he has created other problems that make the trick unworkable. He might have spent his time more wisely by widening his repertoire instead of deepening it into a Marianas Trench.

Still, some of Wonder's work is fabulous, tops, the best. In fact, I believe that the key to reading Wonder is in picking and choosing. You must choose the best stuff and throw away all the ridiculous stuff. That's what I've done with both his Ambitious Card routine and his Wild Card routine, and they work for me wonderfully.

Some of his theoretical work on belief and conviction is interesting, but once again, he creates a rut for himself by thinking deeply rather than broadly. He picks apart in minute detail the difference between belief and conviction, but ignores completely the variability between spectators' responses. After all, not every spectator in a given audience believes a trick in exactly the same way. It is that graph of believability within audiences that intrigues me as a working pro, and I will write about that in my own book, when the times comes.

This book is well worth reading, to be sure, and at times, it has made me think more deeply about magic in a way that matters, even if it has sometimes made me think more deeply in a way that will never matter.

[Michael Finazzo]

Volume II was as good as volume one! Highest rating!