For five years Mike Caveney has been working on this set of books that document basically everything he has performed during his career. When he started he had no idea that the finished product would fill 700 pages over two volumes. As a long time collector of books and because this will be Caveney's legacy, he decided to make the finished product as nice as he possibly could. And now that they are finished and they are everything he had hoped for.
Caveney knew that he could write up the methods, theories, history and funny stories about each routine but he also knew that illustrating them would be a problem. That's when his long time friend and Hollywood special effects man, Bill Taylor, came to the rescue. Bill turned Caveney's basement into a photo studio and for fourteen months they shot pictures. Many hundreds of them made it into the finished books and they are the clearest explanatory photos he has ever seen in a magic book. Because both of these books are printed in full color, each tiny detail is visible.
Volume I is called Mike Caveney Wonders and it contains all of the routines that he has performed going back to his days as a teenage magician in the Long Beach Mystics right up to his current act that includes Magic Paper, The Bow & Arrow and Scissors, Coat, Silverware & Chicken. More than just a How-To book, Caveney describes the creative process behind each routine. In the case of Magic Paper (the torn, restored and animated toilet paper) he explains all five methods that he has used and why each one was discarded in favor of a new version and why he stuck with method five for nearly thirty years. The goal is to teach and encourage the readers how to create their own original routines. A peek at the table of contents reveals the variety of material.
Volume II is called The Conference Illusions and it is a completely different type of book. During the past twenty-two years I have recreated a number of long-forgotten tricks and illusions for the Los Angeles Conference on Magic History and each one posed its own unique challenges. In some instances I had the original apparatus that once belonged to Howard Thurston or Charles Carter and other times the equipment had to be built from scratch. The book chronicles the research into the history of the illusion, the original routines, how we attempted to improve the mechanics of the apparatus, re-think the presentation and design a routine that was suitable for a modern audience. After their debut performance at the History Conference a number of these effects were presented dozens of times for lay audiences at the Magic Castle and were found to be highly effective a hundred or more years after their creation. Each chapter includes vintage photographs and posters from the files of Egyptian Hall Museum as well as behind-the-scenes and action photos or the performances. Few readers will add any of these mysteries to their acts but there is much to be learned from studying ideas that were created by the greatest minds from magic’s Golden Age.
Mike Caveney Wonders
9 by 11.5 inches
456 pages printed in full color on heavy art matte paper
570 photographs
Foreword by Mac King
Printed end-sheets with a tipped-in color frontis-piece
3-color foil stamping on the cover
The Conference Illusions
9 by 11.5 inches
256 pages printed in full color on heavy art matte paper
330 photographs
Foreword by Jim Steinmeyer
Printed end- sheets
2-color foil stamping on the cover
- Both books are housed in a matching slipcase with foil stamped side
- Books and slipcase arrive in a custom printed cardboard shipping box
- Sold only as a set
- First edition published in 2013. This is the second edition published in 2024.
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"If you want to know more about how to construct brilliant magic and routines, you must get Mike's new books! Few people in the world understand magic the way the Cave does." - John Carney
"It is wonderful to read about the routining and details that goes in to every bit. It will take me a long time to go through everything, but that is just a joy." - Lars-Peter Loeld
“I’ve spent half a day with your new books, and to state the obvious: You have done a glorious thing. The thought, skill, good taste, and joy that radiate from your efforts is palpable.” - David Regal
“Superb in every aspect of content and production. Congratulations on a phenomenal job.” - Paul Daniels
“This is one of the most enlightening, amusing, and useful books on magic I have ever read, and I've read quite a few. The advice and insights in the book are valuable to anyone who performs any kind of magic anywhere and even infrequently. These bits of advice and insights are delivered in a non-pompous fashion, which matches the good humor with which the book is written. Magic books are not known for their laugh-out-loud humor but I found myself literally laughing out loud on more than one occasion while reading the books. So congratulations on writing a classic book, containing not just the story of your journey through magic and some of the people you met, not just a record of your attempts at perfecting the tricks you perform, but providing inspiration to try and make magic itself, which you so dearly love, better -- perhaps even to make it art.” - Matt Field
