You begin this one by having your wife leave the room (or does she do that anyway when you begin doing tricks ?). Have her hidden as far away and with as many closed and locked doors intervening as possible. Play this fact up. Then shuffle the deck and have a spectator cut. With the deck face down before him, the spectator now cuts off any number of cards up to half the deck. Without looking at it, he places the bottom card of his cut off portion in his pocket, keeping the rest of the packet himself. The performer, with the half deck remaining, goes to spectator number two who also cuts off a portion. This person, however, looks at the bottom card of his heap and then shuffles it into the packet he holds, along with those the performer has left.

Leaving him to his shuffling, the performer has a word chosen in a dictionary, a spectator riffling through and stopping anywhere at all. Then someone names a color. And any spectator takes the shuffled half deck of cards to the performer’s wife, and passes it to her over the transom or through the slightly opened door.

The performer can proceed with his next trick, a short one. Then, shortly, the wife comes back. She carries the card that was shuffled into the deck and ON ITS FACE IS WRITTEN THE NAME OF THE CHOSEN COLOR, THE WORD IN THE DICTIONARY AND, THE NAME OF THE CARD THE SPECTATOR HAS IN HIS POCKET AND WHICH NO ONE HAS LOOKED AT !

There’s nothing to it really, but it is a lovely hodgepodge of widely different principles that will drive anyone wild who tries to figure it out. Even if he should manage to get an idea as to how part of it might be done, he’s sunk on the rest.

A Si Stebbin’s setup takes care of the cards. Your first shuffle is false naturally. After the first spectator has cut off some cards and put the bottom one in his pocket, the performer nicks the top card of the remaining half deck along the side edge with his finger nail. When the second spectator cuts to a card, the performer does the same thing with the next card down, except that this time he nicks it on the end. When the assistant gets the cards she looks for the card with the nick on the end, adds three and takes the next suit, which gives her the name of the chosen card, which she then finds. Then she locates the card with the side nick and this tells her the name of the card in the spectator’s pocket. She writes this name on the card she’s found.

The color is cued according to a simple code. Think of Governor Bryan but in abbreviated form, like this : GOV. BRY. GOV means Green, Orange, Violet and VRY means Blue, Red, Yellow. If a man brings her the deck the color is in the GOV list, and in the BRY list if a woman brings the cards.

You have also given the card-carrier a fountain pen to take along. If the pen is still capped that indicates the first color on the list, if the cap is on the opposite end from the point, it indicates the second color and if the pen arrives with no cap at all, the third color. [Example : A man brings the cards and a capless pen. The color is violet.]

The dictionary page is forced. I usually use a pocket dictionary, passing out two or three of them, and force the page with Al Baker’s positively diabolical method. He still sells it so we won’t explain it here, but if you don’t have it you should. Otherwise, the old matchbox force with dice is also excellent. It’s simple and looks impromptu. Pass out four dice to be examined. Spectator drops them into a match box which you hold. You close it and shake them up and say that the first two dice, reading from left to right, will designate the page number and the last two, the word on that page. Push the drawer of the box out and the spectators who have the dictionaries take a look. The dice always land right side up because you have eight dice in the box, the other four being glued into place at the opposite end of the drawer. Drop box into pocket and go on with the trick, but later take out an unprepared box containing four dice and leave it on the table. Don’t call attention to it; somebody will look at it — they always do.

The small dictionaries have two columns of words per page. I’ve found it best to avoid forcing a column. As the spectator is noting the dice, merely tell him to count down in the first column, and, if the number is too large, to continue his count in the second column. You always keep that number low to avoid mistakes in counting but they don’t know that, and your statement sounds as if you of all people don’t know what the dice show.

If you do a torn and restored newspaper you might force the page using the torn corners of the newspaper as explained in Jinx #4. And you can duck the thumbtip by having several torn corners all bearing the same page number in your pocket to start, the ones you tear from paper going into the change pocket. Since there are two numbers on the corner you have them multiplied to get the page, and added to get the word. You’ve now got three methods of forcing your page and word, and they all have the great virtue of seeming to be impromptu. What more do you want ?

With minor variations this can be done over the telephone, in this case only one card is chosen. And it must be forced. The telephone trick usually allows of a free choice and depends upon a code. But if you can use a force that is absolutely convincing and unsuspect it simplifies things no end. There is at least one that fills the bill and taken from The Jinx.

A spectator shuffles and gives you 7 or 8 cards from the deck taking them from various parts. Put them in your coat pocket and show how the spectator is to draw one out and place it in another pocket. When you bring them out, bring out a set of 7 or 8 all alike and add the one you just drew to the face of the packet. Spectator makes his selection while you turn your back. Get the remaining cards from him and drop them on the deck. Later when phoning is going on pick up the deck and handle it idly, taking that opportunity to get the duplicates away from the rest of the deck.

Your assistant knows the card and the dictionary word beforehand and the color is cued this way.

If a man’s voice :

G – …introduces self

O – …asks for a color

V – …any other beginning

If a woman’s voice :

B – …introduces self

R – …asks for a color

Y – …any other beginning

Everyone in the room knows the color and so your assistant names that first. Only the people with the dictionaries know the word, so that gets named next. And the card in the pocket, the card nobody knows, is named for the smash finale.