This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 2/27/2021
Elmsley, Alex. Alex Elmsley’s Handwritten Magic Notes. Ninety-seven loose pages of varying sizes, most filled with Elmsley’s trademark calligraphic script, in pencil and ink. Described are many classic Elmsley ideas, among them his famous Ghost Count (The Elmsley Count, including its history and variations), Pocketing the Aces, Oil and Water, Mini-Milton, Serendipity, This Poor Lion (The Christians and the Lions), Royal Exchange (the title changed from “Royal Command”), Penetration of Thought, and more. Dozens if not hundreds of corrections, annotations, and amendments appear throughout. One portion deals with diagramming false counts in established “beat” patterns. Four original pen-and-ink illustrations by Elmsley accompany a typed description of “The Four Card Trick,” his first published use of the count; the pages include corrections in Elmsley’s hand. In the original mailing cover (torn) addressed to L&L Publishing and accompanied by a two-page ALS from Elmsley to publisher Louis Falanga explaining that the “ancient” notes “…were the results of earlier attempts on my part to write a book.” Foxing, chips, and small tears especially to larger pages, but overall good to very good condition. A remarkable and personal record nearly entirely in the hand of an influential sleight-of-hand magician describing his most famous contribution to the cannon of card magic which, in some respects, revolutionized the field. These notes were used as source material for the now-classic books “The Collected Work of Alex Elmsley” by Stephen Minch. In the section describing his count, Elmsley writes that after the method for this now-ubiquitous sleight was first published, “…it spread like smallpox.” However, this sentence has been struck through and was not used in the final publication.