The book was published in 1584.
It was Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, one of the earliest English-language texts to describe magic effects and their methods. I had encountered references to it during my dive into magic history — the deep exploration that started when I fell down the rabbit hole around 2016 and began tracing magic’s documented history back through the centuries. From the Beni Hassan wall paintings in Egypt around 1900 BC through Seneca’s Roman-era descriptions, through the medieval Tubinger Hausbuch of 1404, through Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings in the fifteenth century, and forward to Scot.
I was not reading Scot’s book to find new material. I was reading it because I was fascinated by the history, by the idea that performers had been creating impossible experiences for thousands of years using the same fundamental principles of human perception and psychology. But as I read, something unexpected happened. I started finding effects that I had never seen anyone perform.
Not because the effects were bad. Not because they were impractical. Not because they required equipment that no longer existed. They were perfectly viable effects that had simply fallen out of the collective memory of the magic community. Effects that had been performed, refined, and admired for centuries before being gradually replaced by newer inventions and then forgotten entirely.
They were sitting there in old books, waiting for someone to notice them.
The 90% Principle
Scott Alexander describes in his lecture notes a systematic approach to building material that I find endlessly compelling. He and his collaborator Puck deliberately mine classic magic texts — old books, forgotten manuscripts, out-of-print collections — looking for effects that have “gone by the wayside.” They take these forgotten effects, strip them down to their core, and rebuild them with modern presentations, streamlined methods, and contemporary premises.
The results are remarkable. They end up with material that feels fresh and original to audiences because nobody else is performing it, while being built on foundations that have been audience-tested for decades or centuries. The methods are proven. The structures are sound. Only the presentation is new.
There is a claim, attributed to Fielding West, that 90% of Lance Burton’s Monte Carlo show — one of the most successful and acclaimed magic shows in Las Vegas history — came straight from the Tarbell Course in Magic. Ninety percent. Not original creations. Not cutting-edge inventions. Material pulled from a multi-volume instructional encyclopedia that has been available to every magician in the world for generations.
When I first encountered this claim, I found it almost impossible to believe. How could a world-class show be built almost entirely from a textbook? But the more I thought about it, the more sense it made. The Tarbell Course alone contains thousands of effects across every category of magic. The vast majority of those effects have been performed by perhaps a handful of people in the last fifty years. For all practical purposes, they are new material, because no audience alive has seen them.
Alexander puts it simply: “There are thousands of tricks in there just waiting for someone to come along, snatch off the page and put it on the stage.”
My Own Exploration
My journey through old magic texts started as historical curiosity and gradually became a material development strategy. I did not set out to mine old books for performance material. I set out to understand where magic came from, to trace the lineage of the art form I had stumbled into as an adult. But the deeper I went, the more I found effects that stopped me cold — effects so elegant, so clever, so perfectly designed that I could not believe they were not in every magician’s repertoire.
The problem, I eventually realized, was one of accessibility and perception. The old books are not easy to read. The language is archaic. The descriptions assume knowledge that modern readers may not have. The illustrations, when they exist, are often crude. And the sheer volume of material is overwhelming. The Tarbell Course runs to multiple thick volumes. The classic texts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries fill shelf after shelf. No performer has the time to read all of it, and without a systematic approach, most people dip in, feel overwhelmed, and retreat to the comfort of the latest online tutorial.
There is also a perception problem. Modern magicians, especially newer ones, tend to assume that old equals outdated. That effects published a century ago must be primitive, unsophisticated, or technically obsolete. This assumption is wrong, but it is persistent, and it keeps most performers from even looking at the vast library of material that sits waiting for them.
I started my own mining process by choosing one classic text per month and reading it cover to cover. Not skimming. Reading. Taking notes. Flagging effects that caught my attention. Then, for each flagged effect, I would ask a series of questions.
Does the core effect — the experience the audience would have — still hold up today? Is it clear, dramatic, and impossible? Would a modern audience find it compelling, or has the world changed enough that the effect no longer resonates?
Most effects pass this first test. Human psychology has not changed since these books were written. What was impossible and astonishing in 1920 is still impossible and astonishing in 2025. The fundamental experiences — something appearing where it should not be, something vanishing without explanation, something impossibly traveling from one place to another — are timeless because they violate the same physical laws that have always governed the world.
The second question is about presentation. Can this effect be reframed for a modern audience? Can it be stripped of its dated theatrical trappings — the flowery language, the formal staging, the assumptions about audience behavior that no longer apply — and rebuilt with contemporary energy, pacing, and context?
This is where the real creative work happens. The effect itself is the foundation, but the presentation is the building. And the presentation needs to feel like it belongs in the twenty-first century, performed by a real person for a real audience, not like a museum recreation of a Victorian parlor show.
The third question is about practicality. Can the effect be performed in the venues and contexts where I actually work? A beautiful stage illusion from the 1890s might be structurally perfect but require equipment and staging that are incompatible with a modern conference setting. An intimate parlor effect from the same era might translate perfectly to a corporate dinner.
What I Found in the Pages
I will not describe specific methods or handlings — that would violate the first principle of this blog and the first principle of magic. But I can describe the experience of reading through old texts and finding material that made me sit up straight in my hotel room chair.
I found effects where the audience experience was so perfectly structured that it read like a short story with a twist ending. Effects where the escalation from impossible to more impossible to truly impossible was calibrated with a precision that most modern creators never achieve. Effects where the emotional journey — not just the intellectual puzzle, but the emotional experience of watching — was designed with a sophistication that put many contemporary effects to shame.
I also found effects that had been abandoned for reasons that no longer applied. Some were discarded because they required a style of performance — formal, theatrical, stage-bound — that was going out of fashion when the book was written. But those same effects, reframed for a casual, conversational, modern performance style, would work beautifully in the environments where I perform. The effect itself was sound. Only the packaging was dated.
One effect I found in an early twentieth-century text had been described in a single paragraph, almost as an afterthought. It was a visual transformation that, when I read the description, seemed so clean and so direct that I could not believe it was not a standard part of every performer’s repertoire. I spent a week adapting the presentation, rehearsing the handling, and finding the right context within my keynote format. The first time I performed it, at a technology conference in Vienna, the audience reaction told me everything I needed to know. They had never seen anything like it. Because nobody was doing it. Because it had been sitting in that book, in that paragraph, waiting for someone to notice.
The Competitive Advantage of Going Deep
Here is the strategic insight that my consulting brain cannot ignore: mining old books is a competitive advantage that almost nobody is exploiting.
The vast majority of magicians learn their material from the same sources: the same YouTube channels, the same online magic shops, the same bestselling DVDs and downloads. This means the vast majority of magicians are performing the same material. Walk into any magic gathering and you will see the same effects performed over and over, because everyone is drawing from the same small pool of contemporary releases.
Meanwhile, entire libraries of tested, proven, audience-validated material sit untouched. Thousands of effects that have been refined by generations of performers, documented in detail, and then forgotten. Effects that would feel completely original to any audience, because no living performer is doing them.
In business, we call this a blue ocean strategy. Instead of competing in the red ocean where everyone is fighting over the same customers with the same products, you find an uncontested market space where the competition is irrelevant. Old magic books are a blue ocean. The material is there, the quality is extraordinary, and almost nobody is looking.
How to Start Mining
If you want to start mining old books for new material, here is the approach I have developed through trial and error.
Start with the major classic texts. The Tarbell Course is the obvious starting point, not because it is the best but because it is the most comprehensive. It covers virtually every category of magic and includes hundreds of effects, most of which have not been performed in decades.
Read systematically, not randomly. Do not flip through looking for something interesting. Read from beginning to end, taking notes on everything that catches your attention. You are not looking for finished routines. You are looking for core effects — audience experiences — that could be adapted to your character and your context.
Focus on the effect, not the method. When you read a description in an old text, ignore the dated presentation. Ignore the archaic language. Ignore the assumption that you will be performing in a Victorian theater. Strip all of that away and ask: what would the audience see? Is that experience compelling? If a spectator watched this and had to describe it to a friend, would the description sound interesting?
Give yourself permission to adapt ruthlessly. The original creator was working in a different era, for a different audience, with different constraints. You are not obligated to perform their version. You are obligated to honor the core effect while making it your own. Change the presentation. Update the premise. Find a framing that connects the effect to your character and your context.
Keep a running list. As you read, maintain a list of effects that pass your initial evaluation. You will not develop all of them. But having a curated list of potential material is like having a seed bank. When you need something new, you do not have to start from scratch.
The History Is the Material
My fascination with magic history started as pure intellectual curiosity. I wanted to understand the tradition I had entered, the lineage of performers and thinkers and innovators who had built this art form over millennia.
What I discovered was that the history is not just context for modern magic. It is the raw material for modern magic. The old books are not archives. They are armories — stocked with weapons that have been tested in battle and proven effective, waiting for a new generation of performers to pick them up and use them.
Every time I open an old text and find an effect that nobody else is doing, I feel the same thrill I felt when I first fell down the magic rabbit hole. The sense that there is always more to discover. That the art form is deeper than any one person can fully explore. That somewhere in a paragraph written a hundred years ago, there is an idea that will astonish a room full of people tomorrow.
Go to the old books. The best material in magic might already be written. You just have to find it.