Author Archives: jculpepper

A McGill colleague recently sent me these wonderfully quirky posters depicting fin-de-siecle hypnotism shows. I’m not sure who penned this post at The Public Domain Review, but it looks to me like these are probably stock posters for entertainment hypnotists who couldn’t afford to have original, custom posters designed. The blank space at the top […]

At least three miraculous things happened when I went to see Noah Levine’s Magic After Hours show on Thursday night. A friend-of-a-friend who didn’t like magic now loves it. We were given an intimate, after-hours tour of New York’s oldest magic shop in existence — Tannen’s. Finally, we watched Noah perform impossible feats right under […]

One of the highlights of consulting for Houdini and Doyle: World of Wonders was working with Banachek and Rebecca Liddiard to engage in some Houdini-inspired debunking. Years ago, I wrote a review following the premier of Banachek’s one-man show The Alpha Project when it came to Toronto. Ever since, the work of Banachek, James Randi and others who […]

A whimsical article about Martin Gardner and dice was published today in The New Yorker. Flipping through Ricky Jay and Rosamond Purcell’s Dice: Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck, while reading Gardner’s Scientific American article “Mathematical Games” is highly recommended:

  Houdini and Doyle: World of Wonders has launched! As the magic consultant for this web series, I had the pleasure of working with Shaftesbury, Smokebomb Entertainment and many talented performers this winter. I’ll say something special about each of the magicians who performed with host Rebecca Liddiard, who stars in the new fictional TV series Houdini […]

The brick and mortar magic shop plays a unique role in the education of a magician. I was reminded of this yesterday when I popped into Phil and Evelyn Matlin’s store Perfect Magic. They found the secret items that I desired in a few minutes. We then chatted about Montreal’s magic history, the latest news in the […]

This exciting new magic and fiction find will be auctioned off on April 9th by Potter & Potter.

It’s good to have friends like Shakespeare expert, Dr. Jennifer McDermott. Today, I had the pleasure of giving a sixty-minute guest lecture and performance for her Witchcraft and Magic literature course. What a wonderful excuse this was to thoroughly work through one of conjuring’s earliest and most important works in the English language: Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie […]