The May Sphinx is a “must” issue if only for Jack Trepel’s telephone book test. It completely bewildered us a year and a half ago when we saw Jack and Mrs. Trepel do it. Our heaviest guns had been trained upon the objective of getting permission to run it but we were “blitzkrieged” with a stockholder’s certificate. We hope the fellow who sent us the very same principle in a Reader’s Digest book trick three months ago doesn’t worry any more. We conveniently lost it because Mr. Trepel was the originator, and, at that time, we still had hopes (and promises ?) of getting the green light. However, we won’t be stopped at saying it is a much more mysterious trick with two people and through use of the En Rapport method of coding the essential data. This is a long paragraph in order to tell you to get a May Sphinx, but it’s worth it.
The Zingone phonograph record expose via Post Toasties is a flop. In short – Zong! Gone!
The S.A.M. could use the money they’d save by printing their own private 8 page M.U.M. to good advantage by making up a neat manuscript which could be added to and which would detail the various exposes via manufacturers over a period of years back — with the comment from these places regarding how well the ideas flopped. With hardly an exception, including the Thurston-Swift business, such efforts to push tricks on the public have hatched and died to the anguish of the advt. agencies and watchdogs of the advt. appropriation. Just count on one finger how many concerns, using magic as a give-away, ever found it strong enough to continue for long or worth repeating, even years later. Even the monumental Tarbell Course, so valuable to magi, and so hard to get today, was a commercial floppola. THESE EXAMPLES SHOULD BE MAILED TO EVERY ADVERTISING AGENCY IN THE COUNTRY, NOT AS A WARNING, BUT AS A BIT OF SOUND BUSINESS ADVICE.
Elwin Shaw, working the niteries through Mass. and Conn. recently did the torn billet gag (Jinx #6) at a private home. In the middle of the procedure a young lady spoke up, “I paid a chap five dollars for that at Toni’s (a N.Y. swank club) and have done it for all the people here. Show us something hard.” — Incidentally, Mr. Shaw didn’t miss the chance when it happened that Holden’s Boston shop discovered ten misprinted double face cards with the same card on both sides. He bought them all and is now making a good thing of that Dr. Daley trick in Jinx #85.
We used to get our face slapped for contradicting, but Bill Larsen’s arm can’t be 3000 miles long. In May Genii, he winds up the Proskauer lauditorial – “This closing statement should make our readers understand much : when Julian found that other magicians did not approve of Stunts, Inc., he closed it up. And in the doing he lost $14,000. He won’t talk about it, but I have this on unimpeachable authority. How many men of means would do as much just because they loved our craft ?” We were going to display it on one of our occasional “funny pages” but it didn’t seem worth the expense. We mean the advertisement displayed on page 72 of the May issue of Advertising and Selling. It is of Stunts, Inc.! Gadgets Make Sales ! Stunts ! Make Gadgets ! And the first line of copy reads, STUNTS ! marches on —–. To us, the most appropriate line in the copy starts, “Our work is strange.”
There’s a radio magic series in the middle west looking for a sponsor. Two 15-minute episodes have been transcribed, the program based on fictitious adventures of a magus, able, for once, to actually do the tricks brought into the story. No exposing.
This is too late for use by most magi, but Orville Meyer got some nice mentions through duplicating the hypnotic stunts portrayed by David Niven in Eternally Yours and, of course, mentioning the picture. You can use the tie-up idea on the next movie-magic pic.
Magic of words – this has us a bit groggy. One of the cigarette ads radioed “— cigarettes were put with other popular brands of a higher price. Smokers then tried the various cigarettes without knowing which was which. 82% of the testers never guessed that —- brand cost less.” — It doesn’t seem like good policy or much care about good-will when a dealer drops a price from $10.00 to $4.50 within three months. The original price for the new Serpent Silk always did look like an inflated value, but that’s not our business. There are a number of grouchy purchasers around, and people who can spend $10 for an apparently non-apparatus effect aren’t to be gotten grouchy. After all, the Neyhart Houlette dropped only 50% from $75 to $37.50. This is a 55% cut. Or are we boring ? That is, if you weren’t an original buyer.
C. A. George Newman has our sympathy and envy. The former is for the work entailed and the latter is for what it accomplished. He has a complete file of the weekly Billboard “Magic and Magicians” pages from the first issue on Nov. 10, 1917 to date, all mounted and bound with indexes.
Readers : No more copies of that last Thayer bulletin, please. We have nine at this writing.
Sam Margules, who is producing the Servais LeRoy full evening 12 person show for N.Y.’s Heckscher Show on June 6, was watching a recent magic performance and sort of burned at the incompetent M.C. Those who know Sam will realize how he exploded, finally, with “He’s the nittest-wit I ever saw !”
Elaine Siedler is a N.Y. dance instructess who books a line of 8 dancing girls for club and banquet shows. She has added a magic routine to the act which we caught the other night in Hartford, Conn. Three girls enter dressed in white satin evening gowns, large hats, and large pocketbook bags hanging on arms. From the start to finish the act is silent and done to music. Each produces a lighted cigarette, puffs, and changes it to a small bouquet of flowers. From the bags come wands and newspaper squares. The wands are wrapped, vanished, and reproduced via the bodice. Next comes the Phantom Tube, brought on by another girl in black as a French maid. Each of the three takes some part in putting it together. The center girl then holds it while the other two alternately yank the hanks. Next are taken from the bags, three silver handkerchief boxes and these are made to produce as many more silks as possible. The Torn and Restored Laundry Ticket is next, also done in triplicate. And lastly comes the Parasol Trick, using the rolled mat and change bag. All three take part, the maid takes the apparatus, the girls take a walk, and the audience takes a breath. One couldn’t kick, at all, about the neatness of presentation. But we’d like to see a magician impress anyone with a trick after they had watched 3 girls do it in unison.
That English Woolworth counter display of magic has been circumvented. Brunel White informs that, after many letters of protest, the powers that be are now sealing the tricks with instructions inside. The way things appear to be at the moment, however, it looks as though they’ll be well buried under sand bags.
