Mike Caveney – Wonders

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For the past five years I have been working on a set of books that document basically everything I have performed during my career. When I started I had no idea that the finished product would fill 700 pages over two volumes. As a long time collector of books and because this will be my legacy, I decided to make the finished product as nice as I possibly could. And now that they are finished I can honestly say that they are everything I had hoped for.

I knew that I could write up the methods, theories, history and funny stories about each routine but I also knew that illustrating them would be a problem. I am no artist. That’s when my long time friend and Hollywood special effects man, Bill Taylor, came to the rescue. Bill turned my basement into a photo studio and for fourteen months we shot pictures. Many hundreds of them made it into the finished books and they are the clearest explanatory photos I have ever seen in a magic book. Because both of these books are printed in full color, each tiny detail is visible.

Volume I is called Mike Caveney Wonders and it contains all of the routines that I have performed going back to my days as a teenage magician in the Long Beach Mystics right up to my current act that includes Magic Paper, The Bow & Arrow and Scissors, Coat, Silverware & Chicken. More than just a How-To book, I have described the creative process behind each routine. In the case of Magic Paper (the torn, restored and animated toilet paper) I have explained all five methods that I have used and why each one was discarded in favor of a new version and why I stuck with method five for nearly thirty years. The goal is to teach and encourage the readers how to create their own original routines. A peek at the table of contents reveals the variety of material.

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