Magic. 1400s–1950s Hardcover – Download: Adobe Reader, June 18, 2013

If magic is your passion this book will knock your socks off. Lots of bang for the buck here. This is a huge book, choc-full of wonderful, vintage posters and photos. The posters and advertising pieces are all presented in a super-sized format and all in brilliant color. Five hundred and forty-four pages, that's less than a penny a page. At forty bucks you could buy an extra copy to decorate a family room or office. The book is very attractively bound and comes in a sturdy, decorative slipcase and an eye-catching dust jacket (as shown). I must confess, I am not a magic aficionado. I am as fascinated as the next guy at seeing a lady cut in half and put back together or miles of colorful silk scarves appear out of a pants' pocket - but that's not what attracted me to this book. I collect advertising and graphic art and thought this would be a nice addition to my collection. I was not disappointed. Not every image is museum worthy but the few that aren't are the exception. The material on Houdini is particularly interesting and quite extensive. It will take me a while to finish reading this behemoth as the pictures are quite a distraction, but that's not a bad thing. I scratch my head every time I see one of these Taschen mega-books. How do they produce such quality at the prices they do?Amazon held up shipment on this book for a while and I am not exactly sure why. My copy was not as tightly bound as some books I own in this oversize format but it otherwise seemed just fine. A previous comment suggested there was some missing material from this new edition (150 images out the original 900). I never saw the earlier edition and frankly, at my age, another 150 pages would render this book unliftable. I also happen to live right on top of the San Andreas Fault and am not real anxious to risk upsetting a very delicate equilibrium.I don't know how many copies they printed of this book but I wouldn't waste too much time. If your waiting for a better deal - it ain't happening. (just my opinion)

Beautiful art book containing wonderful poster images and history of magic.Just to clarify some of the differences between this and the earlier book:1. The original book had 650 pages, this edition has 544.2. This book is also in 3 languages (English, French and German).It still weighs around 14lbs. and is a large format art book. (Page height is nearly 15.5 inches). It's gorgeous, fairly heavy, and I'm happy to have it! Honestly, if I hadn't read about the earlier version of the book I would never guess this was "scaled down". It's still a very impressive book!From http://www.wildabouthoudini.com/2013/06/magic-1400s-1950s-released-in-new.htmlUPDATE: Re the differences between this and the larger edition, the following is from the editor of the book, Noel Daniel:"The smaller version is meant to offer readers the chance to discover the wonderful world of magic for a great price. To be able to offer a smaller version of the first edition (the larger book) at a trade price, we did need to reduce its physical size, which meant also reducing its page count and therefore the image count. Even though the smaller version is reduced by ca. 150 images of the original 900, it is still a fantastic, illustrated overview of 500 years of magic. This material has never been brought together in this manner before, and much of it has never been published. I spent many, many months personally visiting archives and incredible private collections to select these images from the original 30,000 that I gathered. Both the large and smaller versions are important publishing events in the history of magic.In terms of the images that I cut from the original larger size, of course, it was very hard, as all of the images mean a great deal to me. However, I tried to retain critical images that I felt readers would like to see, while cutting images that perhaps were repeated in some aspect or contained information that could be found in other images."

As my husband put it, this book (like some other monsters published by Taschen, such as one on Hieronymus Bosch) is more than a coffee-table book—it’s practically big enough to be the coffee table itself. I kid you not, it’s almost too heavy to lift. If you or someone you know is a fan of stage magic, though, it’s a must… and, at its current (2017) price on Amazon, quite a bargain (I think it used to be much more expensive).Although the book traces stage magic back to its medieval origins among traveling jugglers and purveyors of the cups-and-ball trick, it focuses on the entertainment’s heyday, the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The text, in English, French, and German, provides an interesting history, detailing the different performance venues, types of tricks, and individual magicians who were popular at different times. I think the book’s greatest draw, though, is the endless array of posters used to advertise the acts, all displayed in full color and many at full page size or even two pages (quite a spread, given the size of the book), and each extensively captioned in the same three languages. The best of these lithographed posters, some of them nine feet tall, are real works of art, full of floating ladies, grinning skeletons, and dancing devils… not to mention the dapper, tuxedoed magicians themselves. There are also a fair number of black-and-white photos of the magicians performing.In fairness, if you are not fascinated by stage magic, the book’s awkward size and tendency to repetition (not surprisingly, many of the posters are very similar to one another) may make it less than appealing. For anyone who does want to see the many skillful ways in which people can be fooled—and made to love every minute of it—though, I heartily recommend it.