Judge Gary Brown: Inventive Magician, Historian, and Author
In this episode of The Magic Book Podcast, United States district judge and accomplished magician Gary Brown discusses his journey from "accidental biographer" to respected magic historian. He shares insights on writing "The Coney Island Fakir," researching Henry Slade, and authoring innovative books "Wandcraft" and "The Inventive Magician's Handbook." Gary offers perspective on the challenges of magic history research and previews new revelations about Alexander to be published in Gibecière.
Transcript
Coming up in this episode of The Magic Book Podcast.
Judge Gary Brown [:Look, magic history is really hard because it's filled with self promotion and lies. And it's really hard to sift the truth from the self promotion. And so much of our traditional magic histories were built on those self promotional aspects that magicians put out there.
Adrian Tennant [:You're listening to The Magic Book Podcast, conversations about classic and contemporary books that teach, illuminate, and celebrate the art of magic. I'm your host, Adrian Tennant, a lifetime student of magic and mentalism, occasional performer, and longtime book collector. Thanks for joining me. Welcome to the 10th episode of The Magic Book Podcast. Today, my guest is Judge Gary Brown, a United States district judge and accomplished magician, writer, and historian. As an author, Gary has made significant contributions to magic literature, including over 35 articles, including "Henry Slade and his Slates: From Europe to the Fourth dimension," published in Gibecière. Gary has also authored 5 books including "The Coney Island Fakir: The Magical Life of Al Flosso," "Wandcraft," and most recently, "The Inventive Magician's Handbook ... with Props." Gary's performances and lectures have taken him to stages across the country, including an appearance on Penn and Teller Fool Us in 2023.
Adrian Tennant [:When not presiding over federal cases, Gary continues to explore and document magic's rich history with his latest research on Alexander set to be published in Gibecière this summer. Gary, welcome to The Magic Book Podcast.
Judge Gary Brown [:Adrian, it is a delight to be here. I am a huge fan, and I've binged every episode.
Adrian Tennant [:Wow. Commitment. Thank you. Well, let's start at the beginning. What first sparked your interest in magic?
Judge Gary Brown [:Okay. I've thought a lot about this question, and I could give you the standard magic kit as a kid and that sort of thing, but the real core to my origin story is I had the opportunity to take lessons around age 11 with Sam Winiger, who was a, Depression-era magician who ran a variety store not far from where I lived. And for a few dollars, he would have these group lessons. And the most important thing from that was he grew up in the Depression and said, "We don't buy magic, we build magic." And he taught me to use the things in the variety store to make magic.
Adrian Tennant [:Can you remember your first magic book?
Judge Gary Brown [:Indeed, I can, and I have it with me, the original copy. When I was young, I was interested in magic. My grandfather bought me the Dunninger "Encyclopedia of Magic," which, in my view, is the bible of bad magic, particularly for the audience that it was intended for because these came out of, comic book strips, right, originally and then it was compiled. And I was looking at it last night thinking about talking to you today and it's just awful. I mean, it has more tricks using hydrochloric acid than any other book I own! And why would you give that to a child? But it did allow you to dream in terms of making a person levitate, cutting off someone's head, all these insanely impossible tricks, which I still can't do, but it made you think about things.
Adrian Tennant [:Well, you started writing articles about magic and magic history in 1994, and I counted - you've written over 35 to date. What attracted you to writing specifically?
Judge Gary Brown [:It might be the urge that we all have to over-intellectualize our childhood hobbies, but while I was in law school, I hit a trove of information about some legal cases that involve magicians, Horace Goldin's Sawing A Woman in Half, "Think-A-Drink" Hoffman suing people to try to protect his act. And I thought, "Well, this is an area I have a unique skill with and I could write about it." I started writing that and I took off from there. I got a a few published things in major published magazines, things like American Heritage spin-offs and so forth, and it was just a great deal of fun.
Adrian Tennant [:Your first book published in 1997 was "The Coney Island Fakir" - or "Fak-ir" - how do you say it, Gary?
Judge Gary Brown [:I say "Faker" because that's the way he said it.
Adrian Tennant [:Perfect. It is, of course, a biography of Al Flosso. Now I've heard you say that you were an accidental biographer in relation to that. So how did that project find you?
Judge Gary Brown [:Yes. So it it's an interesting story. I met Jack Flossso. I went to the shop one day because I always frequented magic shops and introduced myself. I had never met Al Flossso. He had passed by that time. And I started talking to Jackie who was just a trove of magical information. He knew everything and everyone and he could tell a story.
Judge Gary Brown [:He was a raconteur that you just could spend hours with. And I looked at him one day and I said, "You know, your father's 100th birthday is coming up. You and I should write an article about your father because people talk about him." And Jackie was a little reluctant at first, but I convinced him and we wrote something. It was it was good enough. It appeared in the M-U-M and with it, I did something unusual. I included the exciting new technology of including my email address because I had an email address. And I got contacted from people all over the world, from Brooklyn to Los Angeles to literally to Hong Kong.
Judge Gary Brown [:Magicians who read the article or got their hands on it somehow and said, "Hey, have you heard this story about him?" And after some number of months, I had this file. Because I would just print each one out and throw it in this folder. And I had this folder, and it was like an inch and a half thick. And I thought, "Okay, I have to do something with this." In other words, this is information that was not documented anywhere. And I felt obligated, in a strange way, to write the book. And I talked to Jack and we worked together and he was great because he could put everything in context. He had a terrific insight.
Judge Gary Brown [:I will tell you, Adrian, that to this day, I still get people contacting me with stories about Al Flosso that I've never heard. That happened 2 weeks ago. I was in a magic shop and someone said, oh, you wrote that book? Let me tell you about the time he crashed a wedding. And he thought it was a wedding. It was actually a Bah Mitzvah. It was hilarious, and I still get those sorts of stories. Max Maven told me some stories, filled in some gaps after the book came out. So it was just a fascinating project and it was really really fun to do.
Adrian Tennant [:How long did it take you from start to finish?
Judge Gary Brown [:Ironically, that was a pretty quick book to write. It was a different time to do research and we could get into that a little bit. It wasn't a very research-heavy book. It was much more an oral history. So it was people contacting me and then Jack putting me in touch with other people. You know, I'd go to the shop and Jeff Sheridan was sitting there or Sol Stone and they would tell me some things. I ran around with a micro cassette recorder everywhere and I would say it was a probably about a year start to finish to put that book together and it was just incredibly fun and funny and, you know, Flosso did not leave a huge written record the way, say, Mike Caveney had with "Carter The Great," where he had bookkeeping records.
Judge Gary Brown [:You know what I mean? We know how much he spent on peanut butter or whatever. Flosso was not that. I had a shoebox full of junk, you know, his S.A.M. card and some of the things knocking around. To the extent I did traditional research, this was the pre-internet age and it was very hard to do. Fortunately, Flosso didn't have a very big written record - and that's still true today even with databases you can't find that much on him and it was more of an oral history, so that was the fun part of it.
Adrian Tennant [:Well, actually, when we were preparing for this interview, you did mention that the contemporary examples of magic biography back then were Mike's "Carter The Great," and, of course, "Houdini!!!" by Kenneth Silverman. "The Coney Island Fakir" relied heavily, as you mentioned, on oral histories. So what challenges and advantages did this approach ultimately present compared to that more traditional archival research?
Judge Gary Brown [:So it was fun and funny to do. I got to meet lots of interesting people, people like Teller who contributed the introduction, so many, Jamy Ian Swiss, so many people who just knew Flosso, knew of him, or had stories about him. So that was the great part. The hard part was whether or not you were right. In other words, I know that lots of the things in the Al Flosso biography are probably wrong. They're probably a story that someone took as truth and then related to me, and Jack said, "Yeah, I think that happened," and the level of verification was very low. I did not have a lot of editorial support here.
Judge Gary Brown [:A little bit of traditional research I did involved, and I think some of your listeners would be interested in this, going to the Library of Congress Rare Book Room to use a complete set of The Sphinx, 'cause I found a bunch of references in the indices to The Sphinx referring to Flosso and he wrote a few articles and then there were those sort of monthly reports. There's always that that column in the front of those magic magazines about "so-and-so was playing the Catskills for the summer." And I had to go to the Rare Book Room because things weren't online. Things that you do now from the comfort of your living room, I think Lance Rich was talking about this with you recently. You had to burn a lot of shoe leather to get to. The one plus of going to Rare Book Room was I was using Houdini's copy of The Sphinx, so there were little marginal notes that were Houdini's notes, which is just insane. But Ken Silverman talks about this a little bit too.
Judge Gary Brown [:He talked about, like, the difference between going to the Rare Book Room as being the high end of that research, and the low end was meeting collectors in bus stations where they, like, showed him on some crappy old piece of paper and he wrote down whatever he could get. Because it was hard it was much harder to get information at that time, and so it was much more challenging. But we did what we could. We built a skeleton and tried to put some meat on the bones, and I'm very proud of the result.
Adrian Tennant [:As you should be. I'm curious, Gary, how does your legal background influence your approach to the historical research and, of course, the writing?
Judge Gary Brown [:That's interesting. I'm a judge now, but I was a prosecutor for many years. I learned investigative skills, so I learned to pursue evidence and follow leads. Of course, it's a completely different kind of world. In court, we have to have certainty in certain levels beyond a reasonable doubt and so forth. When I was working early on as a magic historian as such, Charles Reynolds sat me down. He was a good friend of Flosso's. He was Doug Henning's manager.
Judge Gary Brown [:He's very famous. He wrote the the poster book. And we were having lunch and he looked across the table and he said, "You can't write about magicians. They're constantly reinventing themselves." And that's the problem. I do a lecture now where I tell non-magicians that, "Look, magic history is really hard because it's filled with self-promotion and lies, and it's really hard to sift the truth from the self promotion." And so much of our traditional magic histories were built on those self promotional aspects that magicians put out there.
Judge Gary Brown [:You know, Thurston discovered the fountain of youth. He had a face lift. He had a face lift! He promoted it as though he had ... right? He had found something magical and that's why he suddenly looked young. It's hilarious. And the problem with following just the story, just to self-promotion, is we lose a lot of the really good stories that way.
Adrian Tennant [:If you're enjoying this episode of The Magic Book Podcast, please consider leaving a rating on Spotify or a review on Apple Podcasts. You can also follow The Magic Book Podcast page on Facebook, thanks. Gary, your article, "Henry Slade and His Slates: From Europe to the Fourth Dimension," was published in Gibecière 23 back in 2017. What drew you to research 19th century spiritualism?
Judge Gary Brown [:Okay. So thank you for asking that. The Gibecière piece on Slade is one of the things I'm proudest of from a history standpoint. I came across a reference to Slade in one of Houdini's books. I think it was "Miracle Mongers." And I just was fascinated by this idea of this guy who took little chalkboards, wrote things on them, and people went wild over it. Adrian, we were still in the pre- Internet research era, so I researched that piece for more than a decade, and that involved ridiculously large expenditures on rare books. It involved travel and knocking on doors and doing all the really hard parts including something I think many of your listeners will be unfamiliar with, the notion of inter-library loans.
Judge Gary Brown [:Right? So there were these rare spiritualist pamphlets I needed and there would be one copy in Cleveland and my local librarian would get on the phone with the librarian there and say, "Well, they'll photocopy it but it'll be $3 a page," and I'd say, "Okay." And they'd send me some 20 pages or 50 pages, whatever it was, and it was hit-and-miss. Because sometimes it was one of these ridiculous spiritualist tracts that mentions Slade once and there was nothing more, you know. And then there was the microfilm. Right? Microfilm and microfiche. If you don't know what that is - I'm talking to your listeners now because I know you do - I would say that as a judge, if someone committed a misdemeanor, spending many hours looking at microfilm would be an appropriate punishment. Right? You're in a dark room with this insane optical device. It's impossible to hold your place, and if you jigger a little bit, you go you you slide off the page.
Judge Gary Brown [:I researched all of Slade's history, which had a lot of legal elements to it because he was the first medium convicted of a felony. He was convicted in a fraud in London. Fascinating story. Great story. But putting that together, I had to go through every daily copy of every daily London newspaper and where they actually reprinted, thank goodness, the transcripts. So I had, like, a word-for-word transcript. So unlike the Flosso book - where people were just telling me great stories, I was writing them down and laughing - this was slogging through pages of newspapers and magazines and pamphlets to put together this incredible story of the guy who not only was convicted of fraud, but also created the "scientific," quote-unquote, "scientific basis" for the existence of a spatial fourth dimension.
Adrian Tennant [:It is a fascinating story. Slade was, of course, a controversial figure. What was the most surprising or unexpected aspect of Slade's story?
Judge Gary Brown [:Wow. That's an unfair question because there's so many things. Okay. The ease with which he got over on investigators, on scientists, was fascinating. This guy Zöllner wrote this entire treatise about him basically, with one exception, creating tests for him and Slade would come close. The way a magician would say, "Oh, you want that to disappear? Well, it's not gonna quite disappear, but look," - it got hot or it turned red or whatever. You can do whatever you can get away with And Zöllner, who was seriously afflicted, bad eyesight, probably certifiably insane, would say, oh, look at that.
Judge Gary Brown [:It's proof of my theory on the fourth dimension, and that's where spirits live. And it caught on like wildfire, which is remarkable. I mean, you watch a Star Trek episode today and they talk about the fourth dimension - it started with a guy, a truly mad scientist, and this con man who kept getting over on him in the matter of a few days in Germany in the 1870s and it's just such a great story. It has all sorts of elements. One I didn't write about because of a number of, space reasons at the time was that, Slade was a physical hermaphrodite and had a lot of secondary female characteristics. A lot of people don't know this. There's only a few little pieces of evidence of this, but it helped him because he was a very attractive man and men loved him, women loved him.
Judge Gary Brown [:He just used those skills to get over on people, and I just I think it's a fascinating story.
Adrian Tennant [:That's worthy of a follow-up article - or possibly a presentation at a Yankee Gathering.
Judge Gary Brown [:Yeah. At at some point, yes. I agree. I agree.
Adrian Tennant [:Well, of course, there is another magic connection directly with John Nevil Maskelyne, whose role in the Slade trial is often overstated in magic histories. How did you interpret the actual court records differently?
Judge Gary Brown [:So the thing about Slade's trial was it was handled by a magistrate judge and while I was doing all this research, I actually eventually became a magistrate judge when I was doing that writing. So I was able to truly appreciate what the courtroom dynamics were like. You know, Slade hired this sort of bruiser of a criminal lawyer who just savaged the witnesses, I was able to ultimately read the magistrate's opinion and that was the most revealing thing. There's a lot of legal technical stuff which is really boring. But the interesting part was we read the histories of magic where Maskelyne is portrayed as the hero of the story. Now, Maskelyne got on the stand and he did some tricks with slates that were far more sophisticated than what Slade was actually doing in some ways. He was using chemical tricks which Slade didn't use till much later as far as I could tell. The magistrate ultimately says, "Look, I don't care about all of that."
Judge Gary Brown [:"That was important in the court of public opinion." The newspapers, we've all seen those old sketches of Maskelyne with the slates and Slade in the background going, "Wow!" and whatever. And if you look at those pictures, some of the spectators are drawn as ghosts. It's a little joke. You have to look at them carefully to see that. But it's always pitched as he was really important. The Magistrates said, "I don't care about that. Two gentlemen came in here, and those were Darwin's associates, and they said that the slates were written on before the writing was supposed to happen."
Judge Gary Brown [:And that sworn testimony is enough to convict him. I don't care about all of the courtroom fireworks that went on, which is whatever he focuses on. And, of course, it goes back to what I mentioned earlier about the self-promotional aspect of magic history. Maskelyne spent the rest of his life saying, "I'm the guy who got Slade. "Well, not really. Not really. From a PR standpoint, absolutely. But from a legal standpoint, not at all.
Judge Gary Brown [:And I thought that was really interesting.
Adrian Tennant [:Mhmm. You've worked with some really notable editors including Stephen Minch at Gibecière and Larry Hass at Theory and Art of Magic Press. Gary, how have these collaborations influenced your approach to writing about magic and magic history?
Judge Gary Brown [:I will say that in my view, Stephen Minch and Larry Hass are the two best editors in magic that I've encountered. And I've encountered a broad range of editorial assistance, some not at all, and then sometimes people get very involved. People like Larry Hass and Stephen Minch, if you're a writer, they will push you. They will drive you to the right point and I'll give you two quick examples if I can. When I was working with Larry Hass most recently on "The Inventive Magician's Handbook," we were designing props. And I would send him something and he'd say, "Gary, I'm looking at this prop and it's a card. Does the prop ... does it want to be a card? I think it wants to be something else." Now being a skeptical New Yorker, I'm like, "It's a card. It doesn't want anything..."
Judge Gary Brown [:"It's not actually ... I checked. It's not alive." And no. "No. No. It wants to be something different." And after he would push me, I would come back and we would exchange more communications and ultimately, for example, there was a coaster in there, with a chicken on it which is a great trick and that is what started as a card but it didn't wanna be a card and Larry pushed me. While that book is maybe 200 pages, I probably wrote 500 pages because each time I'd rather send a trick, he'd say, "Does this trick really wanna be in the book or, you know, is it something else?" Good editors push you.
Judge Gary Brown [:Stephen Minchis a little bit different in the sense that his focus is on historical accuracy, which is something we desperately need such that we've had conversations like this: "Here on page 5, you have a quote here and there's an ellipsis. Are there 3 dots in the ellipsis or are there 4 in the original text?" So here I am going back and digging out the 18th century piece to find out if there were 3 dots. Or or he'll say to me, "The Springfield Gazette is 'the' part of the title so that we should italicize it or not?" So I have to go look up The Springfield Gazette. But it's that kind of drive. Right? When at the time it's happening, I'm like, "Oh, god!" But then when the result is in, it's because they push me to do my absolute best work, and that's the that's the glorious thing. And that's why I would work with Steven or Larry on absolutely anything.
Adrian Tennant [:What an endorsement. Well, we're going to get into something else that you're writing for, Gibecière, in a little bit. Gary, how do you typically approach the writing process? Do you create a detailed outline first and write to that? Or is it more organic?
Judge Gary Brown [:It's more organic. I will say that I have an outline in my head usually, and because of my legal training, it tends to be end-oriented. Right? In other words, when you're a lawyer, you're an advocate, even as a judge, you're trying to make a point. You know what the point is and then you have to figure out a compelling, interesting, engaging, and entertaining way to get to the point. So usually, I have a point in my head. Sometimes, you discover things while you're researching and you say, "Oh my, I'm wrong," or I found something even more interesting. And so I do allow that to go on. But you wanna try, I think, to have a focus, but I'm never locked to an outline because I can't ...
Judge Gary Brown [:... With a book, I may do have sections. Right? That would go in this section or that section, and I'll separate things out that way. But once I'm in this section, I just I just write it.
Adrian Tennant [:One of your earlier articles was about spiritualist, Eusapia Palladino. And, of course, you also created the Viking effect Spirit Trumpet. These things came together when you appeared on Penn & Teller: Fool Us. You performed a spiritualism-themed mentalism piece featuring your Spirit Trumpet channeling Eusapia Palladino. How did you develop that routine?
Judge Gary Brown [:Okay. So I'm gonna do this two ways. The scripting takes a number of historical liberties, so you'll forgive me for that and we'll talk about that in a moment. The device: I was doing some audio experiments and I found a way to do something very interesting with sound using modern technology, which could have been done with earlier technology, but I figured out this thing and then I figured out what am I gonna do with it. And first, I made a piece called Cardboard Radio. I actually performed it a number of times, and it was a basically a cardboard box that would look like a kid drew a radio on it and would make it play sound. And that was interesting. And then you would just rip up the box and you could tear it up and hand it out, and there was nothing there.
Judge Gary Brown [:It was really quite a good trick, but it was a trick. And I said, "I have to do something better with this," and that's when I turned to my knowledge of magic history. And I knew about the spirit trumpet, and I decided that it would work better as a spirit trumpet. Now, there's a long shaggy dog story about how I got to where I got, but eventually I was on the phone with George Robinson telling him, "This is a very interesting thing I have," and he's like, "Look, I'm busy. Got a lot of things going on." Of course, he's the best magical craftsman out there. If I can get him to make it, I was thinking, great. And he said, "Send me a video."
Judge Gary Brown [:And I sent him a video, and he emailed me back, "Sold. We're gonna work on this together." And he took what I did and put it on steroids, his craftsmanship, and he introduced some additional technologies that I did not even know existed, and the resulting piece is this beautiful thing. Once you have the device though, the better thing about the spirit trumpet, unlike the radio, is you can talk to it. You can have a conversation. I showed it to a few performers who said to me, "It's like a ventriloquist act. You can talk to it." That's what Slade did with the slates.
Judge Gary Brown [:Right? Instead of wraps under the table, he wrote words. You could talk to it. So we can do something with that. Now I did use Eusapia Palladino. I'm not a 100% sure. I don't think she actually used a spirit trumpet. I think that went to other mediums, but that was a little bit of artistic license. I like Palladino.
Judge Gary Brown [:I knew her story. I like the Italian piece of it because they speak a little of Italian. And the voice that actually you hear on Penn & Teller might sound like my wife. I'm just saying without giving up any state secrets. And despite some Internet theorists who wrote me and said, "You must have had the woman under the table with a rubber tube," I wasn't going to subject my wife to living under a table for hours while we filmed the show, so no, that's not how we did it. But it was great fun, and being on Penn & Teller was one of the best things I've done in my entire life.
Adrian Tennant [:What continues to fascinate you about the relationship between spiritualism and magic?
Judge Gary Brown [:There's a desperate need in magic for plots, for scripting, for stories that are not fully self-referential. In other words, you can do a trick, say, "Oh, I saw this guy at a magic shop and he showed me this thing. And look, it's a cup and it's a ball." And we do a lot of that. Right? A lot of magic is self-referential. You need to reach out to other areas. It could be mythology. It could be history.
Judge Gary Brown [:It could be a lot of things. And one of the great overlaps, of course, is spiritualism - because not only were spiritualist people who used magic effects, some of them not so well, some of them better. Actually, Slade was actually quite talented in some ways, but also had the interaction with magicians trying to expose them. So you can kind of play it from a lot of ways. So I think that spiritualism has been and continues to be a rich source, And I will tell you, people are very interested in that. When you perform for muggles, as we call them, I guess - they're very interested in it. I often hear questions about, "Well, do you believe in things?" And that's a little uncomfortable because you don't wanna step on people's beliefs and I don't do it as an exposer.
Judge Gary Brown [:At the same time, I'm not gonna contribute. So I always tell people, "You know, the amount that I believe in someone who is a sensitive or psychic is inversely proportional to the amount that they're charging you. Keep that in mind."
Adrian Tennant [:Wise words! Just a reminder that you can be notified when new episodes of this podcast are published by subscribing to the email alerts. You'll find all the details on the podcast website at TheMagicBookPodcast.com, which is also where you can find transcripts, plus accompanying blog posts with summaries, timestamps, and links to resources mentioned in each episode. Gary, let's talk about your two books published by Theory and Art of Magic Press. First, "Wandcraft," which was published in 2021. What motivated you to explore the history and craft of magic wands?
Judge Gary Brown [:So everything I've done in magic has resulted in something else. It always leads to, like, opportunities, but never the one you predict. You know? I got a call out of nowhere from the IBM after I wrote the Slade thing, and they asked me to be the distinguished lecturer at their 2018 national convention, which I was overwhelmed. It was just such a great opportunity. And I was doing something on stage that required me to hide something. And it was a particular stage illusion I was doing, and I wasn't doing it well. And every time I showed it to a friend - I have a lot of magic colleagues who give me feedback - like, "Yeah, but that thing you're hiding in your hand, it's pretty obvious." And I tried every which way to conceal this thing and then I thought, "Let me try a wand."
Judge Gary Brown [:So I added a wand and I was able to handle the thing and someone came up to me and said, "Well, that wand must be your remote." Well, it was a dowel. It was just a piece of wood. I said, "Well, take a look." You know, and I realized at that moment why it is that magicians carry wands. I realized why it is that classical magicians are always seen with a wand. I'm not somebody who's done a lot of cups and balls work. I know those folks know this well, but I I was just fascinated by the results of using a wand.
Judge Gary Brown [:And then I started looking at the literature and I realized their wand literature is not well developed. It's all over the place. You know, there's some pieces from Professor Hoffmann, which probably the most plagiarized piece of writing in all of magic history because it appears in a 1,000 different books and it's Professor Hoffmann's words. And I realized somebody needed to pull it together in one place, and so I pulled together wand theory, came up with some effects to go with it, came up with some ways to create wands, talked about wands that are commercial wands, and put it all in one book. And I think the result is a lot of fun and probably useful to some folks.
Adrian Tennant [:Now you've had an opportunity to reflect on the book and see how it's been received by the magic community. Two questions. First of all, why do you think many contemporary magicians have moved away from using magic wands?
Judge Gary Brown [:That's something that I learned while studying the book is something that ebbs and flows. There are periods of time when magicians consistently write, "Only the old timers use wands, don't use a wand." David Devant wrote huge tracts about he would use anything except a wand. He would use other things as a ruler, a cracker, all these different things to avoid using a wand though he was still using wand techniques. Then they come back in fashion because people say, "Hey, we should be using wands again." And so you're gonna see that go back and forth and you could actually chart it over periods of time. The 1870s, it was huge. And then in the 1890s, it falls apart. The 1920s, it comes back.
Judge Gary Brown [:So if contemporary magicians are saying they shouldn't use a wand, I get it. Can be deemed old-fashioned. On the other hand, since I wrote the book, magicians are coming to me and tell me, "This is great!" that just carrying the wand makes their job easier. For example, I got a long note from a restaurant worker. I had to do a lot of restaurant, walk-around table work. He said, "I no longer have to explain that I'm the magician. I walk up with a wand. People know that I'm the magician."
Judge Gary Brown [:And I think Harry Potter has changed that a little bit, although the wand looks different. And I was surprised to see younger people tell me, "I don't know what that thing is. Wands are supposed to look like a bent stick, not a polished rod." So it's gonna take different forms, but I think the the advantages are so great that even if it's out of fashion, it'll come back.
Adrian Tennant [:When we were preparing for this podcast, you did mention to me that there had been a bit of a marketing challenge, you realized, because people think the book is a book of crafts.
Judge Gary Brown [:I have had so many magicians come to me and say, "Gee, I really wish I could learn how to use a magic wand," and I sort of say, "You know, I kind of wrote a book about that. If you wanna look at it, it's not expensive." But I've gotten the feedback. It's called "Wandcraft." They assume it's an arts and crafts book, which is a negative connotation because magicians have too many books where it says, "Get this and separate the cards, glue them back together," and they just don't wanna do it. So we thought it was a clever title. I still think it's a clever title, but it might have had a little bit of a a reverb that didn't work that well.
Adrian Tennant [:Well, "Wandcraft" documents wand theory, as you mentioned, that was previously scattered throughout magic literature. So what challenges did you face in pulling these threads together?
Judge Gary Brown [:First thing was finding it. Right? Because that's the problem with magic literature. It's getting easier now with databases and you had Chris from Lybrary.com on, and that's one place you can go. Conjuring Arts Research Center is another one. There there are now databases, Ask Alexander, where you can find things, but finding the stuff was the first start. And one of the first discoveries I made, as I mentioned, was Professor Hoffmann ["Modern Magic"] is my go-to book, because I consider it the seminal book for modern magic, literally. But then finding all these other books that had sections on wands, and I get the book and say, "Oh, that's the same stuff Professor Hoffmann wrote." You know? So, Jean Hugard wrote a lot of useful material.
Judge Gary Brown [:Some stuff comes out of Tarbell. There's different but just putting the pieces together was a bit challenging. But it's out there, and lots of people have used wands very successfully. I didn't capture everything, but I captured a fair amount of material, and I think, a useful amount of material.
Adrian Tennant [:And, of course, you also included effects with each of those descriptions, which is foreshadowing a little bit the next book, which is, "The Inventive Magicians Handbook ... with Props," which is your second book working with Larry Hass as editor. Gary, what inspired you to create such an ambitious project?
Judge Gary Brown [:It began with a lecture I gave at Mystery School on how magicians invent. I've been inventing things for decades. And in the last decade, I've spent a lot of time coming up with new tricks, new effects, new ways of doing old effects. I became very interested in the process of how do we make magic different because the single biggest complaint about magicians is that they do hackneyed old tricks. Right? That they do tricks. Audience members complain that there are tricks that they've seen before, and we have to do things differently if we wanna keep those folks interested. Of all the things you could complain about about magicians, the fact that they disrespect the audience or wear bad suits and so forth, that old tricks is the biggest complaint...
Judge Gary Brown [:It should be impressive to everyone. So I gave this lecture, and Larry Hass is the Dean of Mystery School. And afterwards, he said to me, "You know, that's your next book. Right? You have to write about this. This is something for you." And that began a very long process of creating and gathering and studying things I've come up with, things other people have come up with, both the things themselves, right, because the book presents a number of new effects, novel effects and nothing's the final word on anything. They're designed to be seeds to give people inspiration, as well as the process of how folks generally create new effects and what the mechanisms are for doing that and I'm so pleased with the way it turned out. Larry and I worked very hard on that book and the reception has been outstanding.
Adrian Tennant [:Well, this is the first serious effort to include props with the magic books since the Tarbell course that you referenced earlier. I'm curious, Gary, what unique challenges did producing and including a prop kit present?
Judge Gary Brown [:It was a nightmare! Because here's the thing. Producing a book - and it's interesting that you've created this podcast that talk about books. And one of the facts the way they get produced, it's really hard. You send out proofs and pages and writing and illustrations, and you gotta pull it all together. It's very difficult. And there's always something wrong. This came back.
Judge Gary Brown [:That page doesn't fit. There's this illustration is in the wrong color. Take those problems and multiply them by some exponential number because now we were dealing with people who made cards and people who made chips and people who manufacture coasters. Try to get them all together and get everything perfect because you don't wanna send out something that's not perfect. And that's one thing Larry Haas - everyone should look at his product seriously - because he doesn't let anything go out the door that's not perfect. And to get everything right was really, really hard, but I think worth it.
Adrian Tennant [:Well, "The Inventive Magician's Handbook ... with Props" sold out within 30 days of release. What do you think resonated most with readers about this approach to teaching magical invention?
Judge Gary Brown [:I wish I could answer that question. I've gotten so much great feedback from so many people, and there are people right now who every day I check my Facebook or my email and I get notes from folks that, "Oh, I used your Santa Claus trick last night in a nightclub," and they send me interviews that they've done with audience members. And they said, "The thing I like best was the thing you did with Santa." Just fascinating. But I've literally gotten notes that have said, "I just read the tricks. I just do the tricks." And then I've gotten those from other readers who say, "I don't read any of the tricks. I just read the theory parts."
Judge Gary Brown [:So I don't know what you know, like, I would like to get a vote sometime. You know what I mean? As to which way it went. But I do think that providing the tricks in the context of how we develop tricks was really important. I just think that that was something that's not been done much or done that carefully, and the other half was providing the props. And that's my what I call the bent corner theory, which I can explain. We all have magic books, we have shelves and shelves and shelves. I'm sure Adrian actually you have more than most because you've covered a lot of material. You know, you're reading through a magic book, if you're a performer and you see something, say, "Boy, that's great."
Judge Gary Brown [:And the example I like to use is Henning Nelms' take on ... he took the old Square Circle trick and turned it into a transposition, a sci-fi transposition. But he wants you to do it with aluminum and copper wire and different test tubes. Like, all sorts of scientific things. And I think to myself, "That's great. It really is great. The next time I have some sheet aluminum and copper wires and electric ..." And he's very specific. "Don't use other parts. You have to use these switches." And "The the next time I have all those things together, I'll do that trick."
Judge Gary Brown [:So I've bend the corner, I close the book, and I put it on the shelf. I could pull that book right now and show you that corner is still bent. I've never performed the trick. So I said to Larry, "If we're gonna do this right, I want people to have most of the props in their hands. So this way, we talk about this particular process or this particular effect or this technique. You can just reach into the kit and pull out the cards." And that was the thing I really wanted to build, and I think that's the part that really resonated with people. You could start doing it right away.
Judge Gary Brown [:Doesn't mean that you're done. Doesn't mean that you might not wanna devise a different prop or a different way of handling it or whatever, but you can start while you're reading. And that was why we worked so hard to put together that prop kit.
Adrian Tennant [:I'm really curious to see if other publishers pick up on the success of a book. Is there a follow-up volume in the works?
Judge Gary Brown [:There might be. I've been looking at two things. One would be applications of some of the theories in there, and I have some material on that. But if also and maybe because of my long-term love affair with the Dunninger book, I've also been interested in bad magic and what we can learn from bad trick like, tricks that don't work, tricks that can kill you. I might be looking at something like that, but I haven't landed on what it is yet, but there's something there.
Adrian Tennant [:Looking ahead, I know you've been working on an upcoming Gibecière article about Alexander which promises some new revelations about this enigmatic figure. Now without giving too much away, what can you share with us about this project?
Judge Gary Brown [:I wanna start with the notion of this is what I'm talking about when we talked about the difference between the pre-digital research and the post-digital research age. The article that I'm going to release in Gibecière in summer of 2025 is the product of having some magic books, having some older authorities, but having access to databases, most of it, newspapers.com, which has more than a billion or billions of pages of just ordinary, "The Altuna Times" newspapers. And I was able to do some targeted searches using material that I found in books to go through the databases and find out things about Alexander that no one knew, that nobody knew. And it was fascinating because I put it together in a matter of months. It's something that again, I researched Slade probably for 10 years. This, I put together in under 6 months. When I had the core of the article together I sent it to Stephen Minch who said, "Wow!"
Judge Gary Brown [:"We all knew that Alexander was a bad guy, but you have taken us on a wild ride." There have been theories about him doing the shooting and killing somebody in Alaska. That may or may not be true. I don't know. I didn't research that. But I found other things of equal magnitude. I found larceny charges that no one's unearthed simply by using certain of his writings, searching them in a certain way, and finding scores of fake identities that he used. And it was absolutely ... it was one of the most fun things I've done in magic history and it is a wild ride, and I'm gonna recommend anyone who's interested in in that material to get their hands on next summer's Gibecière.
Adrian Tennant [:Got it. What is the status of the article now? Is it done done?
Judge Gary Brown [:It's done. It's done. And Stephen's done a great job because that's the other thing about the Slade article would have been a book, but right then publishing was dead and there was a lot of problems. And I know you were interested in in these issues. The market issues are fascinating, you know, that it should have been a book, but this journal does such a fabulous job. And not only is Stephen Minch the editor, but they print everything in color and the color illustrations, they do these wonderful covers and whatnot. It's just a remarkable outlet for someone who's come across something interesting in magic history. I've written for them several times, Slade being the biggest of them.
Judge Gary Brown [:But this thing with Alexander, I just can't believe what I found, and I can't wait till it comes out.
Adrian Tennant [:Marvellous! Now, when we were preparing for this interview, you also mentioned to me that your own magic library was destroyed in a house fire in 2019 and that you've had to rebuild it. So, Gary, how has that experience shaped your approach to collecting?
Judge Gary Brown [:My house was destroyed. We were away, so no one got hurt. So it's one of those things where you have to say, "Thank goodness," right, everyone was well. We're blessed that no one got hurt. That said, the fact that probably at that point, 400 to 500 magic volumes went up in smoke, first editions, things signed by things that I can never get my hands on again, honestly, is was such a heartbreak. And by the way, your home ins insurance doesn't cover this. Right? If you have a standard policy, you have a Houdini book, as I did, worth $1,000, let's say. They will reimburse you the cost of an Amazon paperback because it's a book.
Judge Gary Brown [:To them, it's there's no collector's value. So putting the resource issues aside, though, it was years of collecting. What does that mean? I had to start again. First of all, I will tell you many collectors in the community were very generous. People sent me crates of things, posters and books and things just to get me started again, which was very, very kind. But in terms of acquisitions, I realized that a signed first edition and the paperback that came out last week contains the same information. So if you're interested in the information in a book, it doesn't matter which edition you get. It you don't have to have the original here's something for your listeners, the signed Erdnase.
Judge Gary Brown [:Okay. There we go. I'm just throwing that out there. You don't need a 1st edition Houdini book, you can get a reprint of it if that book interests you. My interest has shifted slightly. I have many fewer magic history books, many more performing books because that kinda picked up. And also, my library is now full of the cheapest and worst like pamphlets and lecture notes and things that I could buy where I could pick out 25 things for $50 and get a big box of things and it's exciting. Most of them are terrible.
Judge Gary Brown [:Mimeographed, awful things. But you go through every one of those books and there's a gem. There's always a gem where you say, "Oh, look at that. This guy came up or this woman came up with this idea and no one's seen that in a century. Maybe I'll perform that." And that's been the joy of it was rediscovering the fun of just buying a big box of moldy paperbacks and going through them and saying, "Hey, there's a really great idea." And as you looked at "The Inventive Magicians Handbook," many of the ideas I came up with started from some $2.50 paperback that Karl Fulves has put out with Dover Publications or some lecture notes from a magician no one's ever heard of.
Judge Gary Brown [:And you say, "But there's a kernel of an idea there. The patter is all wrong. The prop is wrong. The premise is outdated, but there's something there that's genius," and that's the fun part.
Adrian Tennant [:I'd love to talk a little bit about the way you now think about developing effects. In the latest book, you talk about method, prop, handling, and script. How do you apply this practically? Is it literally step-by-step, or is it again a more organic process?
Judge Gary Brown [:It it is more organic. I was trying to define what it is that we do as magicians. Right? So you read something from you know, read, Professor Hoffmann's description of The Ambitious Card, and it's this cloudy, overstuffed thing. "The cards have ambitions, and the queen wishes to be not with the commoners." Like, if you do that today, unless you're doing a period piece, the audience is gonna light torches and chase you up a hill. Like, there's no way. But you look at The Ambitious Card, and David Regal looked at it and turned it into somebody calling their dog. Right? "Draw your dog on this card."
Judge Gary Brown [:"Call your dog." And he even says in an interview, people talk about [it] "They don't talk about some card trick I did, but did you see when he had that woman whistle for her dog and it came to her?" That's the idea. Right? So you have the method, and there he kept the prop the same. He used a deck of cards, but he changed the script and he changed the handling. And that's the thing. You can do that with any magic effect. You look at it and whenever I'm watching another magician, I think, "Oh, I like that, but I would change that script. I would make that a funny story or I would make that a scary story or I wouldn't do that with a modern prop."
Judge Gary Brown [:"I would make that prop look old. Right? I would age it." And I know that Harrison Greenbaum, who you also interviewed, said just by saying, "Oh, these are my grandfather's cards" or whatever, that doesn't change it enough. And he's right about that. It's gotta be substantial change to really make it yours and make it different. But if you take something, as I did, I mentioned my Santa Claus trick, which is actually based on something that Martin Lewis came up with, and he looked at it without relating the whole story, looked at me and said, "You've done exactly what magicians should do. You took something of mine, and you changed it so much that if you didn't tell me it was mine, I wouldn't have recognized it," because I changed the handling. I changed the script.
Judge Gary Brown [:I changed the prop, But it was his idea. There's no question. His method is there. So in developing the we call it the MEMPHIS anagram. Right? So to help people remember, you can change any one of those elements or multiple elements to make an old idea new again. So much so that people say, "Wow! Where'd you get that? Is that the newest thing they're selling on a website?" No. It's something that was in a 1922 paperback or lecture note that I found, and I realized I can build it into something new.
Adrian Tennant [:This is The Magic Book Podcast, so I have to ask you, Gary, what is your most cherished magic book - or books - and why?
Judge Gary Brown [:Yeah. I'm glad you made it plural. So I will say despite ranting about how you don't need a signed original, I have one as a very kind gift. My wife actually bought me a copy of Ricky Jay's "Cards As Weapons," which is a paperback that's gone insane with its prices. But it was the one from Martin Lewis's library, and it's signed to him from Ricky Jay. And if you read "Making Magic," Martin Lewis's new book, he actually mentions that book. He says after he came out with "Cards As Weapons," he talks about the inscription Ricky Jay wrote. So that that's the only book I keep in, like, its own box in a library sealed, acid free environment.
Judge Gary Brown [:But that's a collectible. I don't open that. I don't read it. In terms of day-to-day magic books, I'm in Professor Hoffmann all the time. I have tons of different copies, some cheap ones on my color just to get the feeling of the illustrations better. Specific books I'd like to recommend to people. One would be in if I talk about history, I think "The Secret History of Magic" which was written by Steinmeyer and I'm forgetting the other fellow's name. ..
Adrian Tennant [:Peter Lamont.
Judge Gary Brown [:Thank you, Peter Lamont. I apologize, Peter. I think that should be the textbook for the study of magic history because they debunk the kind of history I talked about at the beginning where magicians just brag about things. Most notably talking about Robert-Houdin stopping a war with a Light and Heavy Chest. Something we all should have known was a magician story, but we fell for it and we told it and we wrote it and rewrote it and they debunk it completely. That should be the starting point, I think, for most magic historians. In terms of performing books, I would put up Larry Hass's two books, "Inspirations," and "Transformations." There's material in there that is so good that every magician should read those two books.
Adrian Tennant [:Great recommendation. Gary, what advice would you give to aspiring magic historians or writers who want to contribute to preserving and sharing magic's history?
Judge Gary Brown [:Wow. So I feel like Charlie Reynolds thirty years ago when he said to me, "You can't be a magic historian. They're always reinventing themselves." But the answer is remember that you have access to these incredible databases. Right? You have just vast amounts of knowledge that you can sit in your living room, in your bathrobe with your slippers on, and you can research the world. It's amazing. But I think to use that effectively, you have to have the hunger that we had in the days when I had to fly to Washington to read a copy of The Sphinx. In other words, recognize the gift that's in front of you and figure out ways to use it creatively.
Judge Gary Brown [:And I think there's so much material. And so many of the stories that are out there, they got lost because of the self-promotional aspects of magic, because of the lies. Some of the truths are really, really interesting. I did a piece recently on Koran the Mystic, getting his photograph taken with Herbert Hoover by predicting the outcome of the 1932 election that Hoover would win. It's a great story. I put it online. People can look it up if they want. [https://throwingcards.blogspot.com/2018/07/al-koran-at-white-house.html] But the fact that this half-in-the-bag crystal gazer got the President of the United States to come out on the front lawn of the White House probably got the first picture with a President at the White House in history through a trick.
Judge Gary Brown [:It's fascinating. Far more fascinating than Robert-Houdin making up the fact that he stopped a war with a group that didn't really exist. So find the real stuff - find the interesting stuff and bring it out there because it's there.
Adrian Tennant [:Great advice. Gary, if listeners would like to learn more about you and your work, what's the best resource to follow you?
Judge Gary Brown [:So I have a website. It's judgebrownmagic.com. I put up things that I'm doing. I have a blog there. If I do something new, I put it up there. I'm on Facebook and so forth so people can find me in different places, And look out for Gibecière in the summer of 2025, because that's gonna be good.
Adrian Tennant [:Perfect. Gary, thank you so much for being my guest on The Magic Book Podcast.
Judge Gary Brown [:Adrian, it was a delight to be here, and I encourage everyone to go back and listen to all the episodes and to follow you in the future because your stuff is great.
Adrian Tennant [:Thank you. You've been listening to The Magic Book Podcast. In this episode, we learned about Judge Gary Brown's journey from accidental biographer to respected magic historian and author, explored his innovative approach to documenting and teaching magic through books like "The Inventive Magician's Handbook," and gained insights into his upcoming research on Alexander. You'll find the transcript accompanying this episode on the website at TheMagicBookPodcast.com, plus a blog post with a summary, timestamps, and links to resources we mentioned. If you have a question or would like to suggest a topic for a future episode, please contact me, adrian@The MagicBookPodcast.com. Thanks for listening to The Magic Book Podcast. I've been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next time.
Adrian Tennant [:Goodbye.
