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    Mental Magic: Surefire Tricks to Amaze Your Friends
    Mental Magic: Surefire Tricks to Amaze Your Friends
    Mental Magic: Surefire Tricks to Amaze Your Friends
    Ebook143 pages40 minutes

    Mental Magic: Surefire Tricks to Amaze Your Friends

    By Martin Gardner and Jeff Sinclair

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    A barber in Chicago says he'd rather cut the hair of ten red-headed men than the hair of one brown-haired man. Can you guess why?
    Ask Professor Picanumba, a master of riddles who carries dozens of surefire tricks up his sleeve. He'll show you how to astonish your friends and family by predicting the answers to 88 word and number challenges. These tricks require only simple props—a deck of cards or a couple of pairs of dice, a calculator, and a pencil and paper. With or without an audience, these foolproof feats of mental magic offer hours of amusement. Solutions appear at the end, with 64 illustrations in between.
    Author Martin Gardner has written more than 70 books on subjects from science and math to poetry and religion. Well known for the mathematical games that appeared in Scientific American for decades and for his "Trick of the Month" column in Physics Teacher magazine, Gardner has had a lifelong passion for magic tricks and puzzles.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDover Publications
    Release dateAug 29, 2012
    ISBN9780486146164
    Mental Magic: Surefire Tricks to Amaze Your Friends
    Author

    Martin Gardner

    Martin Gardner, born in 1914, has written several reviews for The New York Review of Books and was a Scientific American columnist for over twenty-five years. His books include Calculus Made Easy and When You Were a Tadpole and I Was a Fish. He lives in Hendersonville, North Carolina.

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      Book preview

      Mental Magic - Martin Gardner

      Copyright

      Copyright © 1999 by Martin Gardner

      All rights reserved.

      Bibliographical Note

      This Dover edition, first published in 2009, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., New York, in 1999.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Gardner, Martin, 1914—

      Mental magic : surefire tricks to amaze your friends / Martin Gardner ; illustrated by Jeff Sinclair.—Dover ed.

      p. cm.

      Includes index.

      9780486146164

      ISBN-10: 0-486-47495-X (pbk.)

      1. Mathematical recreations—Juvenile literature. I. Sinclair, Jeff, III. II. Title.

      QA95.G2917 2009

      793.74—dc22

      2009031305

      Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

      47495X01

      www.doverpublications.com

      Dedication

      To my sweet, adorable, brilliant,

      wonderful, long-suffering wife. . .

      who wrote this dedication

      Acknowledgments

      Many friends and correspondents, most of them amateur magicians, invented items for this book. I list them here alphabetically:

      Tom Batchelor, Paul Curry, Karl Fulves, Shigeo Futigawa, Bob Hummer, Max Maven, Tony Miller, Mitsunabu Matsuyama, Charles Reynolds, George Sands, Joseph Schmidt, and Jim Steinmeyer.

      There are others who may have devised some of the tricks without my knowing. Many of the exercises are my own ideas.

      I also thank my wife Charlotte for her usual skill in copyediting and proofing galleys.

      Foreword

      Professor Picanumba, who for many years lived alone in a cave near the top of a distant high mountain, has developed the incredible ability to predict what you will do. Here in this book, our esteemed professor presents a series of tests in which you are asked to freely select certain numbers, words, or pictures. In the back of the book, the professor, having accessed his great power of precognition, has had printed there the outcome of each exercise—before you’ve even done it!

      Work your way carefully through each test, doing just what the professor has asked you to do. When you arrive at the final outcome, turn to the page at the back of the book, in the section headed Professor Picanumba Predicts, for his prediction under the name of the exercise. You’ll be amazed by how accurate the old fellow is!

      Almost every time, the professor will predict exactly the final result of each test. On a couple of occasions he has made a guess that may or may not be correct, but most of the time his guesses will be right on the mark.

      Before starting these tests, you should have on hand a deck of cards, four dice, a calculator, a pencil and a supply of paper. A few puzzles require using other items, but they are usually available around the home.

      The word digit, used throughout the book, means one of the numerals 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9.

      Martin Gardner, D.F.

      (Doctor of Flimflam)

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Copyright Page

      Dedication

      Acknowledgments

      Foreword

      The Tests

      The Professor Predicts

      Epilogue

      About the Author Martin Gardner

      Index

      The Tests

      Wonderland Spell

      Here is how Lewis Carroll began Alice in Wonderland:

      Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading.

      Select any of the first 12 words. Starting on the next word, spell the word you chose, tapping a word for each letter. For example, If

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