CARDOPOLIS 52
GHOSTS, SPELLS AND THE MIGHTY ATOM
Welcome to issue 52 of Cardopolis. Who’d have thought we’d get to this magical number? Cardopolis is devoted to the history and craft of card magic. I’m especially interested in looking at vintage material and making it accessible.
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Cardopolis has an Instagram account. The latest post contains a trick whose origins really surprised me. I’d known it as Switchcraft from Frank Garcia’s Million Dollar Card Secrets (1972). I had no idea it went back 250 years. Stephen Minch tells me it goes back even further, perhaps another century. Click on the image to view it.
This issue brings the Mighty Atom. Mighty Atom was published in the Cornish Pixie magazine in September 1945. The creator of the trick and the magazine was Vivian St. John. But this was a pseudonym. The real creator was Tom Storey. Many in magic thought ‘Vivian’ was a woman, and Tom Storey never bothered to correct them.
Tom Storey had an interesting history. He was born in Nantyglo in Monmouthshire and later moved to the mining town of Tredegar in Wales. It was there he met and befriended Aneurin Bevan, the founder of the N.H.S. Storey was with Bevan at the founding of the Tredegar Labour Party in 1919. He later became a prominent Labour councillor in Wolverhampton and, in 1960, the vice president of the Wolverhampton Circle of Magicians.
Mighty Atom is a clever effect. It has precedents, which I will go into. But in this routine any card can be named and then spelled from the deck. The deck resets each time, and the effect can be repeated. I’ve detailed a routine that builds over three phases, each more impressive than the one before. No sleights, just a simple system and you can use the deck as a regular deck after you’re done spelling.
Crossfire is a lower-effort version of Stabbed in the Pack, an effect popularised by John Benzais and Harry Lorayne in the 1960s. Their approach took real skill. They could actually throw a card into a deck as it lay on the table. There was a knack to having the spinning card bounce off the table at just the right point before it slammed into the edge of the deck. I never mastered it. You had to throw the card at the deck as if you really meant it, otherwise even if the card hit the deck, it would just bounce off. I did, however, like the plot and in Crossfire you throw two cards into the deck, and they land either side of the lost selection. It’s easier than it looks.
Impromptu Haunted Deck was inspired by Gordon Bruce. He showed me a very effective haunted deck effect around 1990. I mentioned this in Cutting Remarks (1991). Gordon didn’t show me the method, and I don’t know if he ever published it. But I think I understood the principle at work and that’s what’s also at work in Impromptu Haunted Deck.
There’s a casual breezy version called Ghost in a Hurry. And a more structured approach which you can see here.