Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear

Entertaining survey of stage magic covering the 19th and (first part of the)
20th centuries. This is really a vastly entertaining book.

It's very strange, I find watching 'magicians' on-stage incredibly boring and
highly sleep-inducing. Reading about them is fascinating!

A great overview of the Golden age of Magic & the characters that inhabited it. Very good on their interactions, their inventions but less so on the "wonder" of what was, probably the finest age to be a magician. You don't have to have a particular interest in magic to enjoy this, just the need to be captivated and enjoy peformance art. At times flabby & that is what stopped me giving it 5 stars

This is a wonderful history of the high points of stage magic, centering around the early 1900s, within a framework of explaining how Houdini vanished an elephant on the stage of the Hippodrome. Woven throughout are real-life stories of intrique, espionage, jealousy, creativity and love (of magic) - along with the secrets of how some of the most memorable stage illusions actually work.

Very readable and edifying.

Fascinating. An engaging partial history of stage magic, particularly during the 1860s and 1870s, and some of the most famous and enduring illusions--not just of how they came to be, but why.

An interesting overview of the development of the stage magician's art around the turn of the twentieth century. Although Steinmeyer reveals a number of the secrets behind famous effects, one of the points he keeps returning to is that the trick itself is secondary to the conjurer's delivery of it. There are some nice anecdotes along these lines, my favourite of which is the recounting of Thurston's method for producing an expression of shocked amazement from children viewing his levitation effect up close.

Terrifically enjoyable history of magic. You may have heard the line "they do it all with mirrors." That turns out to be quite accurate.

True in India. True here

Lively history of the golden age of magic, recounting the evolution of techniques of trickery.