WeRead
Powered by ReaderPub
A practical manual reveals that popular stage mind-reading feats depend on muscle reading and involuntary physical cues rather than psychic forces. It gives step-by-step methods for locating hidden objects while blindfolded, selecting and handling a cooperative subject, sensing subtle resistance or leaning to guide movement, and applying the same cues to identify piano keys or letters on a board. The volume stresses practice, audience selection, and avoiding skeptical accomplices, offers performance tips and common failure explanations, and frames the techniques as teachable conjuring methods rather than supernatural phenomena.
An intelligent foreigner is said to have expressed himself after the following fashion on the absurdities of the English language: “When I discovered that if I was quick I was fast, if I stood firm I was fast, if I spent too freely I was fast, and that not to eat was to fast, I was discouraged; but when I came across this sentence, ‘The first one won one one-dollar prize,’ I was tempted to give up English and learn some other language.”