Dover Magic Books - Classic Reprints

Dover Publications has a long history of reprinting public domain (copyright free) books and graphics, and they've made quite a few hard to find magic texts available over the years.

CLICK HERE to see their current listing for magic (and related) books, which includes volumes by Walter B. Gibson, T. Nelson Downs, Houdini, Jasper Maskelyne, Henning Nelms and other classic magicians.

If you act quickly, they're even having a spring sale on many books, but hurry - it ends tomorrow, Thursday the 21st.

King Of Koins!

T. Nelson Downs was a contemporary of Houdini, Thurston, Kellar, Herrmann, Maskelyne, and Devant, performing worldwide from around 1895 until his retirement in 1912 at the age of 42. He almost certainly devised illusions for Howard Thurston, and though he was billed as "The King of Koins" he was a pretty amazing card handler by all accounts. After his retirement, he opened a vaudeville theater, wrote several magic books, and spent time amusing his grandchildren. Amazingly, I've found some footage of Downs performing, below.



At the height of his career, he performed a trick which required him to palm sixty (!) coins at once. That's almost unbelievable. The King suffered a stroke in 1938 and passed away at the age of 71. He was buried at Riverside Cemetery in Marshalltown, Iowa. His gravestone reads "King of Koins".