Book club The Johnny Thompson
Since a few weeks, the magic has been blessed with a reprint of the Johnny Thompson books.
These books have gotten a god-like status, only if that is for the ridiculous prices that they’ve been going for on eBay and on the magic marketplace.
With the reprint some people have been asking if they should get the book or not, especially since the investment value of the books has dropped when people realized that they’re probably going to be reprinted more often, but who knows?
That being said, I don’t think that you should ever get a magic book as an investment. It is a way to get you over the edge to buy a book, but magic books aren’t made to be investments, they are made to be learned from. They’re not made to rot away on the shelf of some collector who has a dying dream of being a magician but never put in the work or the study to actually do anything from the books.
“It’s a great book”, ooh yeah? So what’s in the book? Show me something from the book.
This being said, if you just want the answer to whether or not to get the books, the quick answer is: yes get the books.
The longer answer is a bit more complicated, but at least as interesting.
The books are great for one sole reason. It held all of Johnny’s life material. In all of the routines you can see that they’ve been worked on, and they’ve been worked in. Johnny just simply knew what he was doing.
This combination of routines that have been done for actual people with someone who knew what he was doing elevates the books to something else. All these routines can be studied and should be taken at face value when first learning the routines.
I’ve taken routines from this book with moves that I’ve never used, and moves that I have substitutes for because those subsites achieve the same thing, but fit better in my hand. An example of this is doing a pinky pull-down, rather than a buckle count. However, I will learn the routine with the moves exactly as Johnny did them and usually, I learn something new.
I don’t just learn a new move, but I learn why he was doing that move in that moment, and why he chose a certain move over another move. This gives us a peek into his thinking.
And I mean, who doesn’t want a peek into the thinking of Johnny Thompson? We’re talking about the main consultant for Penn and Teller, a student of Harry Riser, Malini, Dai Vernon, and Charlie Miller. We are talking about a man who has seen more magic legends in his life than most of us will ever read books about.
The other thing that we have to consider is that this is his literal life's work. It is not some new book by some new magician who is in his 20’s and he’s put out some interesting new moves and ideas. No this is hard audience-tested material that stood the changes of time and the changes of Johnny’s philosophy.
If the price of the book seems like a lot, then I can reassure you that it’s a steal. I have gotten more good magic and thinking out of the first 100 pages, than I’ve gotten out of a lot of recently published magic books. And with that, I would say that this book is one of the best books published in the past 10 years.
In the future, I might go more into detail about specific things in the book, but for now, just do yourself a favor and get the Johnny Thompson books.
But don’t take my word for it fully, see what Jamy Ian Swiss has to say about Johnny and watch Johnny perform his legendary routines over here:
https://www.magicana.com/news/blog/take-two-58-johnny-thompson
-Rico
About Rico
Rico Weeland is a magician from Amsterdam. Spending most of his time thinking about and performing magic.
When Rico is not busy entertaining audiences. He’s likely to be enjoying his funky morning coffee with a good book.
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