Art and Artifice: And Other Essays Of Illusion [Paperback]

The famous magician team Penn and Teller know that a good magic trick does not always depend on fooling the audience. Some of their tricks they do and show exactly how the trick works so the audience can follow along and appreciate not just the mechanics of the trick but also the stage artistry. It wouldn't be much fun if they did this for every trick, but in small doses, their demonstrations heighten the enjoyment of the audience by showing just how clever the workings of a specific trick can be. I think this is the right way to approach also _Art & Artifice and Other Essays on Illusion: Concerning the Inventors, Traditions, Evolution, & Rediscovery of Stage Magic_ (Carroll & Graf) by Jim Steinmeyer. The book is newly re-released after being out of print, and after Steinmeyer's success with other magic-themed books like _The Glorious Deception_ and _Hiding the Elephant_. Steinmeyer is himself a magician, and a designer of magical tricks used by others, so his writing on this subject is authoritative. There has been some backlash from magicians who feel that he is giving away secrets still being used on the stage, but though he does explain in print some specific effects and their histories, the explanations are nothing like seeing the trick itself. In fact, though I read some of the explanations a couple of times, and looked at the diagrams he has given, I realized how much I wanted to see the actual trick, and how much more I would enjoy seeing the effect not despite but because of knowing its mechanics.

The five essays here describe the interwoven lives of some famous and some relatively unknown magicians in pursuit of illusion. The first tells the performance history of the American magician and theatrical illusionist Steele MacKaye, whose tragic failure of a huge auditorium at the 1893 Chicago World's Fair was due to his simple disregard for the practicalities of getting the job done. Then there is the history of "The Moth in the Spotlight", a classic illusion devised by David Devant in 1905, and recreated by Steinmeyer for the 1982 Broadway musical _Merlin_ with Doug Henning. The recreation not only required special hardware, but in every performance the actions of five people, two above stage and three below, had to be perfectly synchronized to make the Moth disappear. Steinmeyer says, "The secret was every bit as wonderful as the result on stage, and maybe even more wonderful." It would be fun to be able to compare. One chapter is the wonderful history of the classic trick "Sawing a Woman in Half", which I was surprised to find had been invented by one man, the British illusionist P. T. Selbit who introduced it in 1921. It was a sensation, immediately copied and sent worldwide by rival troupes. The final two chapters of this entertaining book are both titled "Mister Morritt's Donkey", with the first being "In Theory" and the second "In Practice". Charles Morritt created many memorable illusions, with the Disappearing Donkey under examination here. In examining Morritt's illusion, it is clear that "it's all done with mirrors" is much too dismissive an explanation. Using mirrors, Morritt got results "... nothing short of alchemy." After much research, Steinmeyer brought the illusion to life again, before the Los Angeles Conference on Magic History in 1995. Tracking down the secret and making it work read like a detective novel with plenty of clues and red herrings (and broken mirrors) along the way.

_Art and Artifice_ is a lovely book that explains some tricks, but more importantly explains what it is magicians do, and why we love to be fooled by them. Anyone looking here for a quick explanation of "How did they do that?" will be disappointed; the explanations are here, but they are thoughtful and full of anecdotes of magic history and magicians with oversized personalities. "How did they do that?" proves to have fascinating answers that go well beyond the magician's bag of tricks.

This is a reissue of a collection of five Steinmeyer essays about illusion originally published in 1998 which contains some overlap with his more recent books, Vanishing the Elephant and The Glorious Deception. This book is less polished and comprehensive, but is still quite interesting and well-documented, as those other two books are.

The first of the five essays discusses Steel MacKaye, John Nevil Maskelyne, and David Devant, the latter two of which are familiar to readers of Steinmeyer's other books. The essay is about the use of illusion in a grand scale on the theater stage, where MacKaye had some of the grandest ideas. The bulk of the essay is about MacKaye's desire to build "The Spectatorium," a special theater seating 12,000 that included a miniature ocean on which 3/4 scale ships could sail to show the story of Columbus' discovery of the New World. This was intended to be built for the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, but it ran overbudget and behind schedule, and was never completed.

The second essay is about David Devant's "The Mascot Moth," and Steinmeyer's recreation of the illusion for Doug Henning's "Merlin" show--also familiar to those who have read Steinmeyer's other works.

The third essay is about the history and development of the "sawing a lady in half" illusion, and its relation to Grand Guignol. The fourth and fifth essays are about Steinmeyer's rediscovery and reproduction of Morritt's Disappearing Donkey illusion, a topic also familiar to readers of Vanishing an Elephant.

This isn't an essential purchase for those who have read Steinmeyer's other books--it's not as satisfying a work as the other two masterful books I've mentioned. It is, however, something that does stand on its own and is well worth reading for those interested in the history of magic.

I have just finished reading "Hiding the Elephant" by the same author and was disappointed to find a lot of the stories repeated. "Hiding the Elephant" is a superior book so I'd buy that and forget about this one.

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