I bought the Tarbell Course in Magic the way I buy most things: impulsively, after reading a single sentence that I could not get out of my head.
The sentence, which I encountered in Scott Alexander’s lecture notes on building a stand-up act, attributed a staggering claim to Fielding West: that ninety percent of Lance Burton’s Monte Carlo show — one of the most successful and acclaimed magic shows in the history of Las Vegas — came straight from the Tarbell Course. Ninety percent. Not from cutting-edge inventors. Not from secret collaborators. Not from decades of original creation. From a multi-volume instructional encyclopedia that has been commercially available to every magician in the world for generations.
I read that sentence in a hotel room in Salzburg, sitting cross-legged on the bed with my laptop open, and I did what I always do when a claim seems too large to be true. I went looking for evidence.
The Volumes Arrive
I ordered the complete set. Eight volumes. They arrived in a box heavy enough to require both hands and a slight adjustment of my expectations about what “instructional text” meant. These were not slim booklets. They were thick, dense, encyclopedic tomes that together contained thousands of effects across every conceivable category of magic. Appearances, vanishes, transformations, transpositions, mentalism, stage illusions, close-up work, card magic, coin magic, silk magic, rope magic. If it had ever been performed by a magician, there was a version of it somewhere in the Tarbell Course.
I started reading the first volume with the same systematic approach I bring to business strategy documents. Cover to cover, with a notebook beside me, flagging anything that caught my attention. Within the first hundred pages, I understood why Fielding West’s claim about Lance Burton was plausible.
The material was extraordinary. Not in a museum-piece way, not in a “this was impressive for its time” way. Extraordinary in the way that a well-engineered tool is extraordinary — functional, elegant, and perfectly suited to its purpose. These effects had been designed, tested, and refined by performers who understood audiences at a level that most modern magic creators never reach. The methods were clean. The structures were sound. The audience experiences described were vivid, dramatic, and immediately understandable.
And almost nobody was performing any of it.
The Scale of What Is Sitting There
This is the part that kept me up that night in Salzburg, staring at the ceiling and doing the math.
The Tarbell Course contains, by my rough count, somewhere between two and three thousand distinct effects. That is not a typo. Thousands. Across those eight volumes, Harlan Tarbell documented virtually every major category of magic effect that existed in his era, along with countless variations, presentations, and staging ideas.
Now consider how many of those effects you have seen performed. If you are a magician, you have probably seen a few dozen of the most famous ones — the effects that have been passed down through teaching lineages, that show up in other books as references, that famous performers have adopted and made their own. A few dozen out of thousands.
If you are not a magician — if you are a regular audience member who has occasionally seen a magic show — the number drops even further. You have probably seen fewer than ten effects from the Tarbell Course, and you did not know they were from the Tarbell Course because the performer who showed them to you probably did not mention it.
This means that the vast majority of the Tarbell Course — easily ninety percent or more of its contents — is functionally original material. Not because nobody has ever performed it, but because nobody in any living audience’s memory has seen it. For all practical purposes, it is new. An effect that was published in 1926 but has not been performed in public in thirty years is a new effect. The audience determines what is new, not the publication date.
Why I Had Ignored It
I have to be honest about why the Tarbell Course was not the first thing I studied when I fell down the magic rabbit hole. My journey into magic around 2016 started, like most modern learners, with online video tutorials. I was ordering decks of cards and watching downloads from ellusionist.com in hotel rooms across Austria, learning card sleights and close-up effects that were packaged in slick, modern presentations with professional video production.
The Tarbell Course did not look like that. The books were old. The illustrations were old. The language was formal and occasionally archaic. The effects were described in dense text without the benefit of slow-motion video replays or multiple camera angles. Learning from Tarbell required reading, careful visualization, and significant investment of time before you could even attempt the physical execution.
This is the accessibility barrier that keeps most modern magicians away from classic texts. We live in an era of instant gratification, where a new card trick can be learned from a fifteen-minute tutorial on your phone. The Tarbell Course demands something different. It demands patience, concentration, and the willingness to translate written descriptions into physical reality using nothing but your imagination and your hands.
The irony is that this barrier is exactly what makes the material so valuable. Because most magicians will not put in the effort to mine the Tarbell Course, the material remains untouched. The same laziness that keeps performers from exploring these volumes is the guarantee that the effects inside them will feel fresh and original to any audience that encounters them.
What Lance Burton Understood
The more I read, the more I understood what Lance Burton — or more precisely, whoever designed his show — had grasped about the Tarbell Course. The genius was not in finding a single killer effect. It was in recognizing that the entire framework for a world-class show was already written.
Think about what a Las Vegas headlining show requires. Variety — you cannot repeat the same type of effect for ninety minutes. Visual impact — every piece needs to play to the back of a large theater. Production value — the effects need to support lighting, music, and theatrical staging. Emotional range — the show needs comedy, drama, wonder, and surprise. Escalation — each act needs to feel bigger than the last.
The Tarbell Course provides material for all of this. The variety is built in. The effects span every category. Many were originally designed for stage presentation and play big by default. The structures support theatrical treatment because they were created during an era when magic was theater. And the sheer volume of material means you can be selective, choosing only the strongest effects from each category and building a show where every piece has been handpicked from a library of thousands.
What Burton’s team did — and what Alexander and his collaborator Puck do systematically — was treat the Tarbell Course not as an instructional text but as a mine. They went in with specific criteria: what is visually strong, what is structurally sound, what can be adapted to modern staging and a modern performer’s character? They extracted the effects that met those criteria, stripped away the dated presentations, and rebuilt them with contemporary energy, pacing, and production value.
The results speak for themselves. A show built almost entirely from “old” material that felt utterly fresh, original, and modern to the audiences who saw it.
My Own Tarbell Experiment
After reading through the first three volumes, I had flagged forty-seven effects. Forty-seven effects that I had never seen anyone perform, that had clear and compelling audience experiences, and that seemed adaptable to the contexts where I work — corporate keynotes, conference entertainment, private events.
I narrowed the list to twelve based on practical criteria. Could I perform this with the equipment I carry? Would it work in the venues I typically play? Could I develop a presentation that connected the effect to my character and my keynote themes?
From those twelve, I developed three into performance-ready pieces over the course of about four months. I will not describe the effects themselves in any detail — Rule Zero applies, and the specific effects are less important than the process. But I will describe what happened when I started performing them.
The reactions were different from what I was used to. Not stronger or weaker — different. The effects I had been performing were contemporary designs, effects that many other magicians were also performing. They were good effects, well-constructed and deceptive. But they were part of the current conversation in magic, which meant that audiences who had seen other performers had a nonzero chance of having seen something similar.
The Tarbell effects existed outside that conversation. Nobody in my audiences had ever seen them. Nobody had seen anything similar. The experiences were genuinely new to them in a way that even the best contemporary effects sometimes are not. And new experiences produce a particular quality of reaction — not just surprise but a kind of delighted confusion, the response of someone encountering something they have no category for.
At a technology conference in Vienna, I performed one of the Tarbell pieces as part of a thirty-minute keynote set. Afterward, a woman approached me and said, “I have seen a lot of magic shows. I have never seen anything like that.” She was not being polite. She was being accurate. She had never seen it because nobody was doing it.
The Originality Paradox
Here is the insight that my consulting brain keeps returning to, the strategic observation that I think applies far beyond magic.
We assume that originality requires invention. We assume that to be original, you must create something new. But originality is defined by the audience, not by the creator. If the audience has never seen it, it is original. Full stop. The publication date is irrelevant. The number of people who performed it in 1938 is irrelevant. The only thing that matters is whether the person sitting in front of you right now has encountered this experience before.
This means that mining old texts is not a shortcut to originality. It is a legitimate path to originality. Arguably a better path than invention, because the material has already been audience-tested by generations of performers. The methods are proven. The structures are validated. The only thing that needs to be original is the presentation — and the presentation should always be original, because the presentation is you.
Lance Burton did not become one of the greatest magic performers in history by inventing new tricks. He became one of the greatest by taking proven material and delivering it with a presentation, a character, and a level of craft that was entirely his own. The Tarbell Course gave him the foundation. He built the building.
What This Means for Your Director’s Eye
If you are evaluating your own material — if you are looking at your show with the director’s eye and asking what works, what does not, and what is missing — I want to suggest a radical possibility. The best material for your show might already exist. It might be sitting in a book that was published decades before you were born, waiting for you to find it.
This is not a suggestion to stop creating original material. Original creation has its own value, and the process of building something from scratch teaches you things that adaptation cannot. But if you are struggling to find the right piece for a specific spot in your show, if you need something with a particular emotional quality or visual impact or structural shape, consider looking backward before you look forward.
The library is enormous. The Tarbell Course alone would take years to fully mine. Add in the other classic texts — the works I discovered during my deep dive into magic history, tracing the art back from Reginald Scot’s 1584 Discoverie of Witchcraft through centuries of documentation — and you have a library of material so vast that no single performer could explore all of it in a lifetime.
Ninety percent of Lance Burton’s show was in those pages. Your next signature piece might be there too. You just have to be willing to open the books, read slowly, and recognize gold when you see it buried in a paragraph that nobody has read in fifty years.
The Tarbell Course is not a museum. It is an armory. And the weapons in it are still sharp.