When I first sat down and con­sid­ered the value of the first vol­ume of this col­lec­tion I said:

There are many accepted clas­sic texts in card magic and this is almost cer­tainly one of them.

I’ll now take this state­ment fur­ther and say that vol­ume 2 has to be one of the 10 most impor­tant books on magic ever writ­ten. I have by no means read every magic book writ­ten, but I’ve seen enough to know qual­ity when I see it. This, the sec­ond and final vol­ume in Mr Elm­s­leys col­lected works, is qual­ity and cer­tainly deserves its place in my own per­sonal top ten.
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There are many accepted clas­sic texts in card magic and this is almost cer­tainly one of them. Writ­ten by respected magic author Stephen Minch this is the first in a two vol­ume series that col­lects Mr Elm­s­leys unique take on magic cov­er­ing cards, coins, cups and balls and much much more. The book was writ­ten by Stephen Minch with very lit­tle input from Mr. Elm­s­ley who removed him­self from the magic com­mu­nity to focus on his tech­ni­cal work. The book is a col­la­tion of mate­r­ial sub­mit­ted by Mr. Elm­s­ley along with records and notes kept by his col­leagues and close friends. We should be grate­ful to those who took the time to record this mate­r­ial as well as to Mr. Minch for gath­er­ing it together.

Ide­ally you should get some­body else to do the criti­sism for you; prefer­ably some­body whose job is the­atri­cal direc­tion or pro­duc­tion. Fail­ing that, find any ordi­nary human being. Fail­ing a human being try a magi­cian.
Alex Elm­s­ley (1975)

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