Parlour Magic

An early Victorian handbook of home conjuring: card tricks, sleights with everyday objects, scientific amusements and party puzzles, written for families to perform in the drawing room. Note: this scan has no searchable text layer.

What’s inside

1. Transmutations — colour-changing flowers and liquids, crystals, magic inks, wine changed into water
2. Sight and sound — optical illusions and deceptions, coloured shadows, musical bottles, ventriloquism
3. Light and heat — instantaneous lights, the luminous spectre, miniature thunder and lightning
4. Gas and steam — laughing gas, miniature balloons, the magic taper, musical gas
5. Fire, water and air — coloured flames, the cup of Tantalus, the pneumatic dancer, Prince Rupert’s drops
6. Sleights and subtleties — the ring and the handkerchief, the vanishing sixpence, the magic picture, an omelette cooked in a hat
7. Mélange — illusions of touch and taste, the magic egg, simple electricity

Anonymous, 1838. Complete 204-page PDF. Free to download: check out at $0 and the file arrives by email and on your order page.

This classic is in the public domain. Scans come from library copies, so expect the odd stain or stamp of an old book.