V.
MAGIC WITH BALLS
“. . . they saw Burnaby, head downwards, with his feet in the air,
and he was juggling six balls of copper and a dozen knives.”
Anatole France—Our Lady’s Juggler.
It would perhaps have been logical to treat the manipulation of balls in the first place, for there is little doubt that the whole vast superstructure of sleight of hand has been built upon the discovery, in ages past, that a small round pebble can be held in the palm of the hand without the aid of the fingers. The earliest recorded references to a sleight-of-hand trick are those in Greek and Roman literature relating to the cups and balls trick, small white stones being used by the operators of those days. There are pictures in Egyptian records which suggest that the play of the balls was practiced in the period of the early dynasties; and in ancient tombs these little round stones have been found, together with magic mirrors of metal. Quite recently they have been found in the Celtic burial grounds near Vannes in France. In India and in China the same tricks with balls have been practiced from time immemorial, and with the same basis for the manipulations; namely, the concealment of the ball in the palm of the hand.
Although the trick of the cups and balls has retained its popularity and, indeed, has again become one of the leading items in the repertoire of the closeup worker, the development of billiard-ball manipulation has taken place in quite recent years. There is no satisfactory book on this branch of the art in the English language; the pamphlets that have been written on the subject are merely collections of haphazard sleights, many of them utterly impossible with a ball that would pass for a billiard ball. It is impossible to treat the subject exhaustively in the space allotted to it in this book, but the indispensable sleights will be treated fully in correct order and detail.
In the first place, the balls used should be not less than one and a half inches in diameter; preferably they should be one and three quarters of an inch. If the neophyte finds he cannot handle balls of these sizes, he should content himself with the manipulation of golf balls, which will be treated in the second section of this chapter. The best balls to use are of wood, enameled, polished, and highly varnished and these, together with the half shells to match, can he obtained at any magic store.
I. BILLIARD BALLS
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