Due to its timeliness and the controversies it was wading into, I convinced the publisher to post it online. My lengthy essay, “In Search of Street Magic,” originally appeared in 2007, for Antimony Issue #9. Antimony would survive through 15 issues, and in the great tradition of such journals, fall one issue short of what it owed its subscribers. In 2005, a new and very well produced quarterly magic publication appeared entitled Antimony, a small-circulation journal intended for serious practitioners, for the kind of reader who in the 1970s might have been reading journals like Epilogue, Pallbearers Review, Heirophant or Kabbala, and in the 1980s, Precursor or Richard’s Almanac. The Buck Twins reputedly could sell out entire runs of 10,000 decks in a few days. An infinite supply of new deck designs brought in millions of dollars to some of these retailers, numbers previously unheard in the retail magic business. These combined forces led to the success of newly founded online magic retailers that were suddenly bringing in unprecedented dollars not only selling magic to young amateurs under the new marketing banner of “Street Magic,” but also selling custom playing cards, assiduously collected by the new and rapidly expanding young customer base. The “Street Magic” phenomenon was accompanied by the parallel advancement of “cardistry,” as exemplified by Dan & Dave Buck’s seminal 3-DVD set, The Trilogy, released in 2007. A decade later, “street magic” was all the rage, thanks not only to Blaine’s continuing television successes, but also to the rising fame of television mentalist Derren Brown in the UK, and Cyril Takayama in Japan, among others who adopted Blaine’s breakthrough transformation of television magic. David Blaine’s revolutionary television special, “Street Magic,” ignited a new marketing label in the world of online retail magic, in 1997.
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