Four cards are held in your hand: they are all threes. Now, by simply breathing on them, they change to all Aces. Then, to the astonishment of your audience, you breathe on them again and all the spots disappear, leaving the four cards all blank. Catalogue descriptions such as this, accompanied by Art Deco-style drawings, beguiled several generations of Australians in the first half of the twentieth century. In fact, hundreds of similar entries appeared in Australian magic apparatus catalogues, of which a small collection of 11 is held by the National Library of Australia. Magic-or, more accurately, conjuring-is still as popular as ever but retail catalogues are now mostly available online. Yet the earlier catalogues, with their quaint illustrations and mannered descriptions of magic tricks, appealed to the imagination in a way that a contemporary website or YouTube demonstration can never match.
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