Spring Magic Auction

Marlo, Ed (Edward Malkowski). Ed Marlo’s Annotated Magic Magazine Archive. Approximately 650 periodicals owned an annotated by Ed Marlo, best known in the magic world as a creative force and author of countless texts on card magic. Approximately one-quarter of the magazines bear biting and insightful annotations and comments in Marlo’s distinctive hand, on virtually every type of content, from editorials, to instructions for tricks (oftentimes with suggestions for credits, fixes, or Marlo’s own handling), to advertisements for marketed magic tricks. Titles include Genii, Tops, New Tops, The Blue Print, Magigram, Legerdemain, M-U-M, Linking Ring, Tannen’s Magic Manuscript, and others. Marlo’s comments – many, many thousands of them, spread over hundreds of pages -- are straightforward, and frequently can only be considered, through the lens of history, as both blunt and inconsiderate of any view other than his own. Yet, as private annotations, this should come as no surprise. In several cases, he goes so far as to annotate Dai Vernon’s popular Genii column, “The Vernon Touch” (“Bull!” and “wrong” among other comments), just as he comments on a descriptions of tricks (“this is confusing – not at all a clear transposition”), takes shots at authors (“Typical [Paul] Harris reaching for effect,” “Typical [Gerald] Kosky junk…” or about Busby and Pelky’s “Succession Aces,” “Bull! Its badly thought out.”), or simply reviews the myriad magazines and their contents in a few forceful words: “Trite,” “Not bad,” “misses the point.” Many annotations are self-referential, with Marlo always referring to himself in the third person, i.e. “Marlo’s series came before Vernons [sic] books,” and regularly points to “Marlo’s” versions or methods for various tricks, ideas, and routines as counterpoints to what has been published in these magazines.