How I Got Into Magic
I first became interested in magic through the Paul Daniels Magic Show, which was one of the most popular shows on Saturday night TV in the 80s. Later, when I was about 17, a good friend of mine showed me the Haunted Deck, a card trick where the deck spookily moves on it’s own to leave a selected card protruding. Seeing that live was the final hook - I went to the library and found a book on magic.
That first book was the Modern Magic Manual by Jean Hugard. It’s a bit dated now (in fact, it was old fashioned then) but describes many classic magical effects very clearly. The strange thing was that that book wasn’t in the library’s catalogue, so I managed to keep it for months by renewing it because no one else knew it existed. After I took it back I could never take it out again, because it wasn’t in the catalogue or on the shelf.
Regular visits to the library followed and I read all the magic books I could find, the best being those by authors like Jean Hugard and Walter B. Gibson. In one I found a reference to Abra, a weekly magic magazine, and a subscription to that opened up a whole new world of specialised magic dealers and modern magic books that you wouldn’t have known existed.
Magic is a lot more commercial now and it is easier than ever to learn the secrets, mainly because of the internet. There are hundreds of websites dedicated to selling magical effects, books, and DVDs, and many that will teach you magic for free. So the internet is probably a good place to start finding out about magic.