HOCUS POCUS
The Perfection of the Whole Art of Legerdemain

A serious collector of Shakespeare must wish to acquire a copy of the First Folio of the playwright’s work, just as the collector of Faulkner first editions would seek a copy of The Sound and the Fury. There is usually one book, whether sought after or owned, that is considered the Holy Grail of a collection.

In the words of an early 20th-century book dealer,“the hope and despair”of collectors of conjuring books is Hocus Pocus Junior: The Anatomie of Legerdemain, first published in London in 1634. This book, based on an earlier work on witchcraft, is the first devoted exclusively to magic as a performing art (although“deceit”may have been the more likely term in past centuries). Thirteen editions of Hocus Pocus Junior were noted by the English bibliographer Raymond Toole Stott in his two-volume Bibliography of English Conjuring 1596-1876 (Derby, England, 1976, 1978). However, of the 31 copies he located, only three were in private collections.

So what are the serious collectors of conjuring books to do? Seek the next most desirable book on conjuring, of course. That would be Henry Dean’s The Whole Art of Legerdemain, or Hocus Pocus in Perfection. The first edition was published in London in 1722, nearly a century after Hocus Pocus Junior, and it is still obtainable, in whole or in part (and rewritten in the language of the times), in an uncountable number of books of various titles.

In the mid-20th century a controversy arose among several bibliographers of English conjuring books as to who Henry Dean was and if he was actually the author of the book carrying his name on the title page. Dean was conjectured to be a dealer in magic supplies, a book dealer, or a person in some way connected to an 18th-century publisher of the same name.

What is certain is that much of Dean’s book is taken from Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft, a landmark work published in London in 1584. The intent of Scot’s book was to refute the existence of witchcraft. What better way to aid in this purpose than to expose the secrets of tricks many in the 16th century might have believed to be“real”magic? Scot’s explanations of conjuring feats appeared not only in Dean, but in most other magic treatises for the next 300 years.

Scot wrote: “The true art therefore of juggling consisteth in legierdemaine; to wit, the nimble conveiance of the hand, which is especiallie performed three waies. The first and principall consisteth in hiding and conveieng of balles, the second in the alteration of monie, the third in the shuffeling of the cards. He that is expert in these may show much pleasure, and manie feats, and hath more cunning than all other witches and magicians.”

Dean wrote: “Legerdemain is an operation whereby one may seem to work wonderful, impossible, and incredible things, by agility, nimbleness, and slight of hand. The parts of this ingenious art are principally four: First, In the conveyance of balls. Secondly, In conveyance of money. Thirdly, In cards. Fourthly, In confederacy.”

The title pages of the second through the eighteenth editions of Dean’s Hocus Pocus; carry the lines“to which is now added abundance of new and rare inventions”and/or“with large additions and amendments.”However, in many instances the only notable difference between editions is the imprint on the title page. Toole Stott located eight different London publishers of the book between 1722 and 1800. Five variant imprints appeared in Glasgow between 1762 and 1817. Two publishers issued the book in Dublin and one each in Stirling and Belfast, all during the 19th century. The first American edition – identified as the eleventh edition – was published in Philadelphia by Mathew Carey in 1795.“An abridged edition,”Toole Stott called it,“with additions.”

He believed it to be the“earliest known work on conjuring to have an American imprint.”However, American conjuring bibliographer Edgar Heyl would have disagreed. Heyl was convinced that this honor belonged to the“Legerdemain”section of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Thomas Dobson, a printer in Philadelphia, brought out a pirated reprint of the third edition of this multi-volume reference, titling it simply Encyclopaedia.“Dobson began publication in 1790,”Heyl wrote,“and the Encyclopaedia was issued in parts to subscribers, but without title pages. In 1793 volumes eight, nine, and ten were issued, and it is known that volume nine [containing“Legerdemain”] had made its appearance by about the middle of the year. The [entire] work was completed in 1797, at which time Dobson supplied his subscribers with title pages, all dated 1798, and the sheets he had not yet sold were bound and issued with the same title page. Thus this article [“Legerdemain”] was available to the [American] public two years before the appearance of Dean’s book, and probably was the first treatise on conjuring published in America.”

By the late 19th and early 20th centuries Hocus Pocus was either published as a facsimile or had lost its identity within books of varying titles. In 1886 a Glasgow publisher, Robert Anderson, printed a facsimile of the twelfth Glasgow edition originally published in that city in 1797. An unknown but clearly limited number of this facsimile were issued, printed with wide margins on laid paper with deckled edges; a luxurious treatment that the original editions never received.

On the opposite end of the scale were unacknowledged reprints of portions of the original text included in books which also plagiarized texts from several different sources. Some reference to magic was the only constant in the changing titles. Kellar’s Wizards’ Manual, a pulp publication in print (best as I can determine) from the 1900s to 1950s, is a good example. Forty-five pages of Dean’s text, with their original page numbers, 11 through 56, unchanged, begin this paperbound book, although proper pagination would list the numbers as running from 5 to 50. An easy way of identifying the text’s origin is by glancing at the running heads reading“Hocus Pocus.”

Eighteenth-century editions of the work were printed on cheap, gray, rough-textured paper and bound in coarse cloth without a title label on the cover or spine. The woodcut illustrations were crude. The trim size seldom varied from a 4 by 6 inch format. Nineteenth-century editions were even smaller, usually 3 1/2 by 5 3/4 inches, and especially in America, were bound in paper-covered boards, occasionally using a cover illustration that had no relation to the contents within.

Copies of both the English and the American editions routinely appear for sale missing a title page or several pages of text, the covers detached, soiled or damp-stained. This is not surprising considering that the book was akin to street literature. Yet a copy of this kind will often bring hundreds of dollars at auction and just as much in private sales. What accounts for the charm of Dean’s Hocus Pocus, even in poor condition? What is its appeal to conjuring collectors who strive to acquire a copy of every edition they can? If there is a single answer to this question, it lies in the title. This little book offers“the whole art of legerdemain.”

David D. Meyer
is a member of The Caxton Club,
editor of Magicol: Journal of the Magic Collectors’Association
and a former book publisher.
meyerbooks@sbcglobal.net