Jimmy Fallon Indulges his love of magic

This year, magic has seen a wonderful resurgence in the public consciousness. One of the places this is most apparent on the Tonight Show, now hosted by SNL alum Jimmy Fallon. Jimmy is nearly the perfect subject for performing magic to. You can always tell exactly what he’s thinking and you know immediately when he’s genuinely surprised by something. He’s had three superb magicians featured on his show in the past month:

Dan White

Dan is based in New York, with his own show The Magician at the NoMad.

Shin Lim

is the winner of the latest season of America’s Got Talent. (Although he does happen to be Canadian… confusing!) He is also internationally recognized in the industry as a winner at FISM (essentially the magic Olympics.)

Joshua Jay

An irritatingly photogenic sleight of hand artist from Ohio, now living in New York. Josh holds a special place in my heart as the first original magic trick I ever had published in a professional journal was in his column, "Talk About Tricks” which he edited for MAGIC Magazine for a dozen years. Josh has a show in New York called Six Impossible Things which is sold out months in advance.

Seventeen Secrets eBooks

The two booklets I edited for the Sid Lorraine Hat & Rabbit Club are now available as eBooks. So if you prefer a lighter digital version, or just don't want to pay for shipping, both titles are now available for $15 each at Lybrary.com. Lybrary is the world's largest site for eBooks about magic and its related arts with hundreds of titles including reproductions of rare and out of print books.

Volume 1 includes contributions from me, James Biss, Matt DiSero, Richard Forget, Murray Hatfield, Will Houstoun, Joshua Jay, Michael Weber and Tyler Wilson. Read the full table of contents.

Volume 2 contains contributions from me, Bill Abbott, Denis Behr, Eugene Burger, Alain Choquette, Matt DiSero, Tina Lenert, Chris Mayhew, Ricky Smith, Rob Testa and Chris Westfall. Read the full table of contents.

The print and electronic versions have identical content with a few formatting changes. The photos in the eBooks are larger and in colour. Otherwise they're the same books. They cover a range of material including cards, close-up, stage and mentalism with varying levels of difficulty.

For those interested in purchasing the original print versions, which are limited numbered editions, they are available from the Hat & Rabbit Club's web store for $20 each plus postage.

Magic that Sucks

Earlier this year, I contributed a trick to a special project organized by David Peck and the Mosquitoes Suck Tour. His plan was to create an instructional resource for magicians - magicians teaching magicians - and to take all the proceeds (actually all the revenue!) and put them towards the purchase of malaria preventing mosquito nets. It took a number of months to gather all the contributions and edit them together and the final product is now available. The Mosquitoes Suck Project can be downloaded for just $10. It includes contributions from Bobby Motta, Joshua Jay, Anthony Lindan, David Peck, Brian Roberts and Canadian Magician of the Year Winners Bill Abbott and Jay Sankey. All of the performers donated their time for the project and SoChange provided the filming and editing so 100% of the revenue goes towards bednets.

On "set" with Anthony Lindan, David Peck & Brian Roberts

The download comes as an mp4, 106 minutes long, 2.97 GB. It's an enormous amount of content at an incredible value. The reason for the $10 price tag: $10 buys one insecticide treated mosquito net which protects a family for up to five years. So please consider buying a copy now.

Mosquitoes Suck Project

If you're not interested in magic but still want to help, MST also has a bunch of cool stuff like T-shirts, and an assortment of private label fair trade coffee available at their shop.