Monthly Update #46 (October 2026) 💀🃏👻

Is The Magic Café dying? Plus a séance card trick for Houdini’s centenary.

Happy Halloween and a blessed Samhain to all my Ruseletter readers! 🎃

A few days ago, I discovered that I’ve been pronouncing Samhain wrong for most of my life, and that The Real Ghostbusters is to blame. The Celtic festival is usually rendered “sow-in”—sow as in the pig, not the seed—though that’s the Munster form. You’ll also hear “soun” in Connacht, “sah-win” in Ulster and even “sah-vin” in Scotland (pronunciation varies greatly by region, especially in Ireland). What it certainly isn’t is “sam-hayne”, which is just what the word looks like to an ignorant English speaker like me! That pronunciation, I’ll be reserving exclusively for the cartoon demon who taught it to me (see Monthly Update #10). You live and learn. 😊

You might reasonably ask why a magician should care so much about this issue. Folklore and everyday magic turn up in my scripts constantly, and I’d rather treat the traditions I borrow from other cultures with a decent level of respect. Say it wrong and most audiences won’t notice. But perform for someone who’s Irish, or proud of their Celtic heritage, and “sam-hayne” could come across as dismissive or worse, outright rude.

This month I’m sharing a new card trick built on the pact Harry Houdini made with his wife Bess—fitting, since he died on Halloween a century ago (or did he?). I’ve also got an update on the magic books I’m currently writing, and some thoughts on the future of The Magic Café, or whether it has one at all.

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New on MBOT: Honeymoon with Houdini

On Halloween, the hundredth anniversary of Houdini’s death, I spent the evening writing up a new card trick, “Honeymoon with Houdini”—you can learn it now on Marty’s Bag of Tricks.

If you’re wondering about the strange title of the trick, it’s because you need to remove eight cards from the deck for it to work; I’ve found the best way to do this is to perform any version of Hofzinser’s Royal Marriages plot. As this trick follows a royal marriage, I thought that “Honeymoon with Houdini” made a fun and fitting title for the routine. You can learn several versions of this trick at Peter Duffie’s Marriage Bureau. 🤵⛪👰

Image Credit: Marty’s Magic Ruseletter.

The routine is built upon a little-known mathematical principle from Meir Yedid’s effect Predict-Perfect, so I’ve kept it for those in the know: the routine sits behind a password-protected page. The password is the first word of the secret code Harry and Bess agreed on before he died, so that no fraudulent medium could fake a message from beyond the grave.

If you’re a Houdini fan, you might also enjoy this article from David Pogue, Author of the excellent book Magic for Dummies. It discusses a somewhat controversial new theory about Houdini’s death:

Happy Halloween, Harry Houdini! How’d You Die?

Three Magic Books in the Works 📚

It’s been a while since I gave you an update on the magic books I’m writing, so now—as we rapidly approach the end of 2026—seems a good time to put that right. I’m currently writing three of them. Yes, I know, that’s probably two books too many!

If you’re a paid subscriber, you already have early access to the drafts of all three as I write them. You’ll find links to the Google Docs on the perks page.

Perks for Paid Subscribers

Developing Daley 🩺

The first, Developing Daley, documents my ongoing obsession with “The Last Trick of Dr. Jacob Daley”, more commonly known as Dr. Daley’s Last Trick. It’s actually going to be a series of books, most likely published electronically at first, as I’m not sure anyone is quite as interested in this plot as I am.

One volume will include “Trunk Trick Transpo”, another card trick inspired by Harry and Bess Houdini, which seems appropriate after this month’s centenary. My biggest problem with this project? I keep inventing new routines, like this one, that I think deserve a place in it.

I plan to get the final text for the first volume completed in the first half of 2027, so that I can work on the illustrations in the latter half of the year.

Great Magicians Grow Moustaches 🥸

Although I’ve been working on Developing Daley for longer, the book I’m aiming to finish first is Great Magicians Grow Moustaches and Other Curious Card Tricks. A lot of the tricks are already written up, although they all still need editing.

Most of the routines require a modest amount of sleight of hand, some a little more than others, so I’m pitching it at intermediate magicians. I’m hoping to publish it as a physical book, probably through a print-on-demand (POD) service such as Lulu (paid subscribers will get the ebook version for free).

A second volume, The Little King Who Wasn’t There and Other Curious Card Tricks, is also planned. Putting every trick into a single book would make the spine far too thick to print and handle comfortably.

Indecent Exposure 🍑

It might be a little foolhardy to announce yet another book, but here goes: Indecent Exposure: Risqué Magic for Adult Audiences.

While selecting material from my notebooks for Great Magicians Grow Moustaches, I noticed I had quite a few rude tricks that I couldn’t include (unless I was willing to make the book unsuitable for younger magicians, which I’m not). They’re not typically my style, but with the right audience they’re a lot of fun to perform. So I’ve decided to collect them in a separate volume, strictly for grown-ups, of course! 😉

Here’s what’s in it so far:

• Royal Swingers - A suggestive version of Dr. Daley’s Last Trick using the King and Queen of Hearts and King and Queen of Spades.

• Four-King Transposition - Another titillating transposition routine involving four cards.

• Between the Sheets - A cheeky version of Max Maven’s classic packet trick “B’Wave”.

• Superhero Sex - A voyeuristic small-packet effect that takes place in the bedroom belonging to Reed Richards and Sue Storm.

• Congress of a Crow - A compatibility test for a couple with a suggestive climax.

• Venetian Tricycle Ride - A card sandwich routine with extra sauce! Inspired by the scandalous life of Giacomo Casanova.

• Bullshit Artist - A funny, self-working location effect based on an idea by Tom Wright.

• Love–Hate Relationship - A rude location trick that appears to go wrong, but goes right in the end.

• See You Next Tuesday - A cheeky card routine using alphabet/Lexicon cards with a seriously shocking ending.

• Extrasensory Perversion - A fun gag/comedy item with an origami paper model.

• Profanity Papers - A bawdy version of the classic Calculator Cards using four-letter swear words instead of numbers.

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Is The Magic Café Dying? ☕💀 

I’ve been a member of The Magic Café for nearly twenty years, and lately it has felt like a place in terminal decline—a kind of reverse network effect. Hank Green made a similar comparison recently, likening the dying web to a ghost town (see his video “The Web Is Going to Die”). Thoughtful posts sink without a trace. Good conversations get derailed by a small but vocal handful of online trolls. Even the once lively Workers forum, which has hosted more discussions than any other board on the site, often feels like a stroll through a graveyard these days.

Image Credit: The Magic Café.

So back in August I stopped assuming and started counting. I crawled all 334 of the Café’s forums—334,777 topics in total—read its public member list, and pulled twenty-five years of the site’s own published figures out of the Internet Archive. Then I did the same for four rival magic discussion boards, so I’d have something to measure the Café against.

The headline number is roughly what you’d expect: new topics are down 92 percent from the mid-2000s peak.

Almost everything else the data told me was surprising, and it challenged my assumptions about the site—and about online forums in general. Several things I was certain about turned out to be wrong. One magic forum in my comparison set was as dead as a doornail, but its doomed trajectory doesn’t resemble what I see in the more recent data for The Magic Café. And the most alarming figure I found has nothing to do with the declining number of posts.

I like The Magic Café, and I’m grateful for the work and the money Steve Brooks and his team have poured into it over the years. Its archive is a goldmine for anyone who cares about crediting and the history of magic. And that, as it turns out, is rather the point—and why I still came away worried about its future.

Expect a full blog post soon. In the meantime, I’d like to hear your experience of the Green Palace before I press the publish button.

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Three Videos Worth Watching 👀

As usual, here are three videos I think are worthy of your overstimulated eyeballs. Each video attempts to answer the same question: What should we do when an online community becomes dysfunctional or even disappears entirely?

Magic Reviews Are Broken

Duration: 4 minutes

In this intriguing video, Welsh magician Ryan Chard outlines why he thinks modern magic reviews on YouTube are broken. Rather than merely complaining, he has a concrete plan to do something about the situation: it’s a simple enough fix that you’ll wonder why nobody else is doing it already. I’ll let him explain—it’s exciting stuff.

Where can Magicians Build Community?

Duration: 8 minutes

Another answer to this conundrum is to go where the lights are still on. David (Magic Orthodoxy) makes the case for one of my favourite online magic communities: The Magician’s Forum. It’s a small, well-moderated and genuinely friendly community of diverse magicians and performers. If you’re not yet a member of Rudy’s welcoming website, I hope this video convinces you to become one.

The Web is Going to Die

Duration: 6 minutes

And finally, here’s the video from Hank Green about digital ghost towns that I mentioned earlier. He’s describing the whole web, but the sentiment he expresses applies to magic forums and websites as well.

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Well, on that cheerful note, I’ll leave you for another month. Before I go, I’d like to thank Jim, a regular Ruseletter reader, for telling me that the underlying method behind the “Cage Trick” I mentioned in Monthly Update #45 is Max Maven’s “Kirigami,” from The Violet Book of Mentalism (published in 1980 under his birth name of Phil Goldstein) and reprinted in the compilation book Prism, which is still widely available.

Jim’s email sent me looking in the right places, and I ended up buying the Kirigami download from Penguin Magic, because I’ll never pass up a chance to watch Max perform his own material. It’s left me admiring both the effect and the method even more—I’ll be publishing more work on this devious little principle before long. Thanks again, Jim!

Yours magically,

Marty

P.S. This month I’m running a magical No Spend November, and I’d like you to join me. I’m so sick of the FOMO marketing and the Black Friday hype that sidestepping the whole silly circus seems like the only sane response this year. (Yes, I did just tell you about a download I bought. That was October. The rules start now.) If you fancy joining me in a quiet protest against the grotesque hypercommercialisation of our hobby, here are the rules:

1. No buying magic in November. No tricks, no downloads, no books, no lecture notes—no matter how good the deal looks.

2. Consumables don’t count. If you need a deck of cards, flash paper, or a new thumb tip to keep performing, buy them. The point is to stop accumulating, not to stop doing magic.

3. Gifts for other people are allowed. Early Christmas presents for yourself are not, and you know perfectly well which is which.

4. When the urge to splurge strikes, go to the junk drawer. Pull something out of it, or take a book off the shelf, and learn some magic you already own. You almost certainly have more unlearned material in the house than you could perform in a year (or even, like me, a lifetime).

5. Don’t just defer to December. If you spend December making up for lost time, you’ve proved the marketing gurus right. The aim is to find out how much of the wanting was ever really your own.

6. Stay out of the Latest & Greatest forum. You know why!