Reprint of the original, first published in 1876.

The Practical Magician and Ventriloquist's Guide - A Practical Manual of Fireside Magic and Conjuring Illusions is an unchanged, high-quality reprint of the original edition of 1876. Hansebooks is editor of the literature on different topic areas such as research and science, travel and expeditions, cooking and nutrition, medicine, and other genres. As a publisher we focus on the preservation of historical literature. Many works of historical writers and scientists are available today as antiques only. Hansebooks newly publishes these books and contributes to the preservation of literature which has become rare and historical knowledge for the future.

Learn how to cut off someone's nose without hurting him and how to double your pocket money. Make an egg dance and a penny walk, produce feathers and candy from a silk handkerchief, and change a bowl of ink into clear water with swimming goldfish. With a little time, practice, and the help of this guide, aspiring magicians can astonish their friends and family with these and other classic parlor tricks. Designed especially for beginners by an expert in the art of legerdemain, the book presents simplified versions of popular illusions. Easy to obtain, inexpensive props include coins, handkerchiefs, eggs, and other common household items. In addition, the final third of this volume offers an introduction to the history and practice of ventriloquism.

This book explores the idiosyncratic effects generated as fairytale and gothic horror join, clash or merge in cinema. Identifying long-held traditions that have inspired this topical phenomenon, the book features close analysis of classical through to contemporary films. It begins by tracing fairytale and gothic origins and evolutions, examining the diverse ways these have been embraced and developed by cinema horror. It moves on to investigate films close up, locating fairytale horror, motifs and themes and a distinctively cinematic gothic horror. At the book’s core are recurring concerns including: the boundaries of the human; rational and irrational forces; fears and dreams; ‘the uncanny’ and transitions between the wilds and civilization. While chronology shapes the book, it is thematically driven, with an interest in the cultural and political functions of fairytale and gothic horror, and the levels of transgression or social conformity at the heart of the films.

This study is devoted to the work of two early British filmmakers, George Albert Smith and James Williamson, and the films that they made around 1900. Internationally, they are known collectively as the ‘Brighton School’ and are positioned as being at the forefront of Britain’s contribution to the birth of film. The book focuses on the years 1896 to 1903, as it was during this short period that film emerged as a new technology, a new enterprise and a new form of entertainment. Beginning with a historiography of the Brighton School, the study goes on to examine the arrival of the first 35mm films in Britain, the first film exhibitions in Brighton and the first projection of film in Brighton. Both Smith and Williamson’s work features a progression from the production of single shot unedited films to multi-shot edited films. Their subject matter was inspired by a knowledge of contemporary pantomime, humour, literature, theatre, mesmerism, the magic lantern and current affairs and their practices were underpinned by active involvement in the new film trade. Through the exploration of how these filmmakers cultivated a new way of understanding film and its commercial potential, this book establishes them as key figures in the development of British film culture.

Dickens and Popular Entertainment is the first extended study of this vital aspect of Dicken's life and work. Ranging widely through showmen's memoirs, playbills, advertisements, journals, drawings and imaginative literature, Paul Schlicke explores the ways in which Dickens channelled his love of entertainment into incomparable artistry. Circus, fair, theatre and street performances provided the novelist with subject matter and with the sources of imaginative stimulus essential to his art. Splendidly illustrated with nineteenth-century engravings, many reprinted here for the first time, this study offers a challenging reassessment of Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop and Hard Times. It shows the important place entertainment held in Dicken's journalism and presents an illuminating perspective on the public readings which dominated the last twelve years of his life.