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Hello Roberto!
Once a year, a select group of German-speaking magicians meets for what we call CardWorkShop, usually at Stephan Kirschbaum's beautiful Wundermanufaktur in Nuremberg. One of this year's topics was the magician Paul LePaul, whose life and work were discussed by Lorenz Schär, Roberto Giobbi, and myself.
Together with Lorenz, I put together a biographical piece on LePaul. We compiled a wealth of biographical facts and photographs, along with a spaghetti recipe! You can download it here: Paul LePaul (1900-1958). Get your pasta ready.
Best wishes from Munich,
Denis Behr
Febuary 2026
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New in the Archive
I finally finished Nick Trost's Subtle Card Creations series, which was published posthumously by H&R Magic Books. It is something of a mixed bag, combining good and clever tricks with too much repetition and minor variations of previously published effects. For example, every gambling deal with the Aces is usually repeated once with a royal flush, then once more with a straight flush and a spectator's riffle shuffle (thanks to the Gilbreath Principle).
When a volume in a book series suddenly changes so that it no longer looks homogeneous on the shelf, it always annoys me. The English edition of the four Ascanio books had that problem, with the second two books being a tad taller than the first two. In the case of the Trost series, the layout of the publisher's logo on the dust jacket changed on the final volume.
Some additional publications by Michael Weber and Justin Higham, along with David Regal's big books Approaching Magic and Interpreting Magic have been indexed. Another addition is Anthony Miller's magazine Channel One, which I enjoyed reading. It is one of the many magazines that suddenly stopped and somehow ran out of steam in the last decades.
The book set by Tim Conover (where you might also notice a tiny difference in the way the layout on the spine is handled across the volumes), written by Eric Mead and Tim Conover and published by Vanishing Inc., has also been added. Those are great books by an artist with strong principles and a huge love for magic, who was on a never-ending quest to find the best and most deceptive methods. What particularly spoke to me were the stripped-down presentations, free of any padding or kitsch, focusing on the beauty of unexplainable impossibilities.
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Misusing the Conjuring Archive
In a previous newsletter, I gave a few examples of how some authors occasionally make their crediting life a bit too easy by simply querying the Conjuring Archive without putting much thought into it. While it may be tempting to pick the oldest reference that appears in the search results, that should really be only the starting point of the research. Look up that reference, check others, and try to determine whether there are earlier sources that do not appear in an Archive search.
I see this quite regularly. For example, recently I came across the claim that the Royal Marriage plot "first saw print in" Card Manipulations, 1935. Well, it did not. But if you search for "royal marriage" on my website, you might think so. In another book, Bernard Bilis's "Bilis Switch" was surprisingly credited to Chris Mayhew's A Clockwork Apple, of all things. Another result of an insufficient Archive search.
A different approach was taken by John Mendoza, who rather candidly confessed his stance on the matter in The Mendoza Portfolio No. 1:
"This is based on Bruce Cervon's and Dai Vernon's 'Pineapple Twist,' from Kabbala, Volume 3, Issue #2 (doesn't all that reference garbage just depress you)?"
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Quoting Fulves
As most performers know, the details of card tricks are generally not easily remembered by a lay audience. In and of itself, that's not a problem, as long as people remember that they had a great time and witnessed miracles. However, if a card effect makes use of additional props, it tends to be remembered more clearly. So it's not a bad idea to include a few such routines. In my case, effects involving a rubber band, a hole puncher, beer, or a newspaper fall into that category. Karl Fulves, in his effect "Red Snapper", may take the prize by throwing cards into a frying pan:
"Magician states he will cook a magical omelet. The blue-backed ace thru seven of spades are shown singly and dropped into a frying pan. A mystery card, red-backed, is removed from an envelope, sight unseen, and dropped into the pan."
That's certainly a change from simply using a card case or a hat. By the way, since the last newsletter, the number of Karl Fulves publications listed in the Conjuring Archive has exceeded two hundred.
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Old News
In 1924, Leopold Figner published his collection of card tricks Offenbarungen aus dem Reiche der Kartenkunst. The book was already noteworthy for containing a very early version of the "Follow the Leader" plot, with that leader presentation.
However, it turns out that in that same book Figner also offers an early example of a "Multiple Selection Routine", as well as what is, so far, the earliest known handling of the "Palindrome Cards". Be sure to check out those updated articles. Leopold Figner wrote two more collections of card magic. We'll see if they hold more surprises.
Quite a few further additions and updates have been made since the last newsletter, and among those are the following articles:
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The book Handbuch der Magie by Jochen Zmeck, first published in 1978, is a classic for German-speaking magicians. For a long time, this book was the starting point for any German magician wanting to learn magic. It was simply called "The Zmeck".
I grew up with the copy shown in the video. I lovingly call it the "toilet paper edition" because of how the pages look and feel.
For a few friends, I made a special Christmas gift last December: A towel featuring that iconic cover and a slightly misspelled title. It's a silly pun (changing the B to a T in the title), since "Handtuch" means "towel" in German. I've been laughing about it for months now.
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Copyright © 2026 Conjuring Archive • Denis Behr, All rights reserved.
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