Often as a magician you will find yourself purchasing more magic than you can possibly go through, so I today I am sharing something with you that I have found to be very very valuable for as long as I have been interested in magic. Hopefully, if by any chance you are not using one, you might get a bit of use out of this.

The magicians notebook.

Like most magicians, I have at various stages had the habit of going through a vast amount of material. When ordering something (lets say a book or a DVD) I will normally flick through it and find a couple of things that catch my eye. One or two of them might really stand out, and they will duly be learned and added (or not) to one of my routines.

There will however always be effects that stand out to me, but I decide not to learn them now for one reason or another. Maybe I don’t have the prop that it requires? Maybe it just does not currently fit into my routine? Maybe it requires some knuckle busting move that I don’t have time to learn at the moment?

On my desk I have a A5 (copy size) puka pad. It has a number of dividers in it, and I have these labeled: Cards, Coins, Mental & Other. Any time I find an effect which I want to keep track of, I jot down the trick, it’s location, a brief description of the effect, and I leave the rest of the page blank so I can add notes later.

So for example, opening the notebook in the ‘Cards’ section I might see the following

A Simple Switch
Art of Astonishment (book) Vol 3, page 115
Card Flourish: deck in one hand, card in the other, top card springs from both causing them to switch places.

This way, if I am looking for an effect to add to my routine at a later date, I can flick through this notebook rather than picking one of the 20 odd magic books, or 20 odd magic DVDs (or piles of lecture notes, or VCR tapes, or instant downloads etc etc you get the idea) and browsing through a bunch of effects that I will probably never use with the hopes that something will catch my eye.

I hope this is usefull to someone, because it has been to me!