Select Secrets: Rare & Important Magicana

Daley, Dr. Jacob. Jacob Daley’s Sleight-of-Hand Notebook. New York, 1936 and later. Being a copy of Glenn G. Gravatt’s Second Encyclopedia of Card Tricks (1936) bound in gilt-stamped red cloth owned, used, and kept by Dr. Daley as his private notebook of magic techniques, sleights, and routines. The versos of some sixty pages being filled with inked and penciled notes on and instructions for many tricks and methods, including Daley’s own Cups and Balls routine, and entries with titles including, “Fake Riffle Force,” “Al Baker’s Indicator Sucker Gag,” “Horowitz Mexican Turn Over,” “Chinese Linking Rings (Blackstone),” “My Own “Jordan” Effect Poker Deal,” “Everywhere – Nowhere,” “My Great Mental Trick,” and dozens more related to the tricks or ideas of Dai Vernon (several), Ted Annemann, Jean Hugard, Max Holden, John Mulholland, Arthur Buckley, Nate Leipzig, S. Leo Horowitz (many), Audley Walsh, and others. Entries vary in length from single lines or aides de memoire to full-page or multi-page step-by-step numbered routines. Several include crude diagrams. An incomplete index in Daley’s hand appears on one of the final pages; the doctor’s signature appears on the front pastedown. An apparently unknown and unpublished trove of sleight-of-hand techniques recorded by Daley during his tenure a member of magic’s “inner circle” during the heady era in which New York served as the hub of magic in America, and Daley counted among his closest friends Dai Vernon, Arthur Finley, Cardini, S. Leo Horowitz, and Charlie Miller.