Another random card.

Here is a scan of both sides of the same card. Not only is it interesting as to what trick this accomplishes, I loved the DeLand ace artwork! Here and here are some other examples of antique DeLand's cards via Old West Antiques.

Jumping Frog Brain Teaser

Here is a fun clipping- I wonder if anyone ever wrote in and successfully answered the question! I was also curious to know what paper these were coming from, and so I typed in some of the addresses on the list into googlemaps, and came up with Chicago and it's surrounding suburbs, so I am guessing this is from the Chicago Tribune. I tried looking it up in their archives, but was not able to find any mention of it- but I am not sure if they indexed their brainteasers.

I wonder if the answer penciled in beneath the headline was correct- I adjusted the levels to make it more readable:

Three random cards.

These were just tossed into the box- I am not even sure if they are related, but each has something interesting about it, so I figured I would scan it to show you. I am going to file these three under "mystery items" and I will revisit them if I can find their instructions.

The first card only caught my eye because it has the little pinhole punched into it. The second has that exact pattern on both sides. The red & blue reminds me of retro 3-D printing, so maybe I will try to find some old glasses and see if anything jumps out at me. The 6 of diamonds has that interesting hole on the side, but does not have the same back-cover graphic as the 5 of clubs, so I do not think they are related.

A Stunt With A Suprise

I had the day off & some time to kill, so I figured I would attempt this simple parlor trick and maybe I could amuse my friends with it next time we were out somewhere that I couldn't potentially set on fire.

I set up the trick on my dining room table and had a glass of water nearby- and if you're going to try it to maybe see if you can get it to work, I suggest going out of your way to not burn something down....which is a slight tangent- you would never see this kind of thing in a newspaper today- there would be huge lawsuits from parents, whose children decided to try this while sitting on a pile of gasoline-soaked hay they had brought into the house.

Anyhow, here is my journey in photographs:

Yeah. So it did not send a fireball hurling across my dining room like I was expecting it to. There was plenty of tension between the two matches, the sticks simply didn't burn through- they just weakened enough for the tension to bend them and they fell. I guess they don't make match sticks like they used to. If anyone can get this trick to work, (safely! I am not responsible for you if you burn down your homes!) send me a few photos and I will post them on here!

Element of Purgatory (back page)

The back page of the advertisement doesn't give me any great mysteries to explore, but I loved the detailed little drawings so I wanted to share them with all of you. The ad is small- only about 5 x 51/2 inches- and it struck me as unique not only for the photographs we looked at on day 1, but also in contrast to the other ads, this one has more graphics and less overly wordy descriptions. I wonder if this was a first attempt trying different advertising techniques.

Element of Purgatory (page 2 & 3)

Thanks to googlebooks, I was able to track down the source of yesterday's photographs. The inside of the flier, shown above, gave me some keywords to look for. The tricks described were from Ovette's performances, and it goes back to the "Free Guessing Letter" I scanned back in May.

A few of the pages from the scan of the book are below- it pretty much just copies word for word what I have in the ad, and republishes the picture from the front of the pamphlet.





Looking at this photograph of Ovette from Magic Nook, I am going to weigh in with my opinion that it is him in the photographs. And judging by the hair on his head, I am also going to assume this ad was from at least the 20's if not earlier.

The back page has some hand-drawn illustrations, and I will share those tomorrow!