Scripting Magic

Jamy contributes a lengthy essay to this book, detailing every word and its purpose in a minute-long card trick.

When Scripting Magic was first released in 2007, it was an immediate, surprise sensation. Magicians around the world, hungry for ways to improve their magic, were thrilled to have a volume dedicated to the vital question: what you say when you perform? Written by Pete McCabe and including contributions from 26 of magic’s best thinkers and most experienced performers, Scripting Magic zipped through three printings and has been unavailable for years.

Vanishing Inc. Magic is proud to publish the definitive edition of Scripting Magic. This new version, expanded with illustrations, contains fantastic magic from luminaries like John Lovick, Jon Armstrong, Max Maven, and David Regal, and covers the process for creating memorable presentations. You'll learn how to write, edit, and perform compelling magic in this one-of-a-kind exploration into the presentation of magic.

Stephen Hobbs Labyrinth

In 1997, Jamy contributed the first publication of his billet routine, “Free Association,” to Issue Seven of Labyrinth.

Limited edition reprint of Stephen Hobbs' underground, and fabulous, magazine from the 1990s: Labyrinth. Less than 100 copies of each issue were originally printed, so the material will be new to virtually all of you.

Secrets Of An Escamoteur

Jamy wrote the introduction to this superb book.

In 1996 Ed Brown wrote The Feints and Temps of Harry Riser, a large selection of Riser magic. It was immediately acclaimed by the cognoscenti. A sequel was always planned, but various factors delayed its completion. Hermetic Press is proud to announce that that book, written this time by Mr. Riser himself, is now completed. Secrets of an Escamoteur offers Riser material that the professionals have long been waiting for. In its 247 pages, full details are given on- THE MALINI EGG BAG: its construction and the extraordinarily cunning Riser routine. CHARLIE MILLER'S methods for breaks, double turnover, spread force and second deal. BAFFLING CARD MAGIC: 45 Riser sleights, tricks and routines structured to fool everyone-yes, everyone. THE RISER RINGS: the legendary linking-rings routine with three rings that defies the experts and astounds the public, on stage or up close. Secrets of an Escamoteur is a top-quality hardcover in large format, offering clear and detailed text, painstakingly and copiously illustrated by Earle Oakes.

Switch

Jamy wrote the Introduction and contributes an original routine to this excellent and thorough book..

Few objects that magicians conjure with stir the imagination the way proper currency does. Money never goes out of style. Imagine being able to increase a dollar's value a hundred-fold. In the 1970s, a handful of American magicians encountered an Eastern European circus performer named Vlado, who stunned them all by doing just that! Vlado never published his revolutionary bill change, but variations quickly spread throughout the world of magic. Today it is a close-up standard, known as the $100 Bill Switch.

For three decades, magicians have been exploring new and different applications of this versatile technique. Changing $1 into $100 is only one of countless possibilities. The switch can be combined with items like the mis-made bill, used for transpositions, torn and restored routines, bill to impossible location effects, and much, much more. SWITCH collects the best work on this subject from magicians around the world. In addition to a thorough description of the original handling, more than twenty variations are meticulously taught using hundreds of crystal-clear line drawings. Some variations use a thumbtip and others don't, some use fewer folds, and one uses no folds at all! There are instantaneous and visual transformations, multiple switches, a one-handed change, palm-up handlings, and more.

In addition, SWITCH contains over 60 complete routines as well as sleights, subtleties, utility moves (such as bill productions and vanishes), a definitive history of the bill switch, performance theory, presentation ideas, and several routines that don't even involve money. Plus, for the very first time, Vlado, the inventor of the $100 Bill Switch, emerges from the shadows to tell his own story in a revealing interview.

SWITCH is not just a book of close-up magic - a majority of these items can be performed in a cabaret or stage setting. This is probably the largest single volume in magic literature devoted to one principle. Thirty years after its remarkable arrival, SWITCH brings the bill change up to date and into the future!

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

A timeless classic in how complex information should be presented graphically. The Strunk & White of visual design. Should occupy a place of honor — within arm's reach — of everyone attempting to understand or depict numerical data graphically. The design of the book is an exemplar of the principles it espouses: elegant typography and layout, and seamless integration of lucid text and perfectly chosen graphical examples.

Envisioning Information

A remarkable range of examples for the idea of visual thinking, with beautifully printed pages. A real treat for all who reason and learn by means of images.

Tribes

Jamy is quoted in this book!

Since it was first published almost a decade ago, Seth Godin's visionary book has helped tens of thousands of leaders turn a scattering of followers into a loyal tribe. If you need to rally fellow employees, customers, investors, believers, hobbyists, or readers around an idea, this book will demystify the process.
 
With his signature wit and storytelling flair, Godin presents the three steps to building a tribe: the desire to change things, the ability to connect a tribe, and the willingness to lead.
 
Tribes will make you think—really think—about the opportunities to mobilize an audience that are already at your fingertips. It's not easy, but it's easier than you think.

The God Delusion

Richard Dawkins references Jamy in the new introduction to the 10th anniversary edition of his neoclassic work.

Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, tells of his exasperation with colleagues who try to play both sides of the street: looking to science for justification of their religious convictions while evading the most difficult implications—the existence of a prime mover sophisticated enough to create and run the universe, "to say nothing of mind reading millions of humans simultaneously." Such an entity, he argues, would have to be extremely complex, raising the question of how it came into existence, how it communicates —through spiritons!—and where it resides. Dawkins is frequently dismissed as a bully, but he is only putting theological doctrines to the same kind of scrutiny that any scientific theory must withstand. No one who has witnessed the merciless dissection of a new paper in physics would describe the atmosphere as overly polite. — George Johnson in Scientific American

Inside Jokes

Philosopher Daniel Dennett quotes Jamy in this book about humor.

An evolutionary and cognitive account of the addictive mind candy that is humor.

Some things are funny—jokes, puns, sitcoms, Charlie Chaplin, The Far Side, Malvolio with his yellow garters crossed—but why? Why does humor exist in the first place? Why do we spend so much of our time passing on amusing anecdotes, making wisecracks, watching The Simpsons? In Inside Jokes, Matthew Hurley, Daniel Dennett, and Reginald Adams offer an evolutionary and cognitive perspective. Humor, they propose, evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature—aka natural selection—cannot just order the brain to find and fix all our time-pressured misleaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny. This wired-in source of pleasure has been tickled relentlessly by humorists over the centuries, and we have become addicted to the endogenous mind candy that is humor.

Magic for Dummies

The coolest magic tricks have been gathered together in one book, best-selling author David Pogue's Magic For Dummies, which is guaranteed to leave your friends, family and coworkers spellbound at your mastery of the mystical arts. Perform great magic at the drop of a hat with these tips and tricks — literally — from Pogue and 35 of America's top professional magicians, including a contribution from Jamy Ian Swiss! One of the best introductory magic books available, using simple tricks to illustrated important concepts of performance, misdirection, psychology and more. With a little practice (and some clever misdirection, which lays at the heart of all magic tricks), you'll bewitch everyone around you with card tricks, coin tricks, disappearing acts, and even mind-reading! Magic For Dummies features more than 90 deceptions, illusions, and sleights of hand for all occasions, along with photos, patter, and presentation tips for every trick in the book. A great gift for someone who is considering magic as a hobby.

Sleights of Mind

Jamy, among other magicians, is featured in this book!

Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, the founders of the exciting new discipline of neuromagic, have convinced some of the world's greatest magicians to allow scientists to study their techniques for tricking the brain. This book is the result of the authors' yearlong, world-wide exploration of magic and how its principles apply to our behavior. Magic tricks fool us because humans have hardwired processes of attention and awareness that are hackable―a good magician uses your mind's own intrinsic properties against you in a form of mental jujitsu.

Now magic can reveal how our brains work in everyday situations. For instance, if you've ever bought an expensive item you'd sworn you'd never buy, the salesperson was probably a master at creating the "illusion of choice," a core technique of magic. The implications of neuromagic go beyond illuminating our behavior; early research points to new approaches for everything from the diagnosis of autism to marketing techniques and education. Sleights of Mind makes neuroscience fun and accessible by unveiling the key connections between magic and the mind.

Trade of the Tricks: Inside the Magician's Craft

Jamy is quoted in this interesting book, an anthropologist’s view of the culture of conjuring.

The Magician and the Cardsharp

Jamy is quoted in this superbly readable book, written for the public, about a legendary adventure in the life of Dai Vernon, the most influential sleight-of-hand magician of the 20th century.

The Life and Afterlife of Harry Houdini

Jamy is frequently quoted in this delightful book about Harry Houdini.