Published by The Camirand Academy in 1982, Meir Yedid’s Incredible Close-Up Magic was the first in a projected series that ultimately had only one more installment. The mandate as stated in Guy Camirand’s foreword was to publish "magic that is actually performed to earn a living," and to "introduce new talent and ideas to the magical brotherhood." At the time, Meir was both a working pro and a fresh face on the scene, having just stunned the magic world with a routine in which his fingers would apparently vanish from his hands, thus he fit the profile perfectly.

Now, at around $20 U.S., this 136-page hardcover collection is a bargain. While it contains none of the finger magic that made Meir famous at the time (you’ll have to read Meir Yedid’s Finger Fantasies for that), it does offer 10 commercial close-up routines - 7 with cards, 2 with your thumb, and 1 with a sheet of paper. The material is thoroughly explained and lavishly photographed in the manner that had already been established by The Camirand Academy in their Masters of Magic series.

"Compucard," the opening trick, is in many ways the centerpiece of the book (indeed, Gary Ouellet writes that their original intention was to release this as a separate manuscript). A freely chosen card is returned to the deck, whereupon the deck is "activated" like a computer. It goes through various visual processes, including shifting in odd, computer-like ways, then finally, the selection is spewed from the center of the pack. This is still one of Meir’s finest routines, and it features a number of novel techniques, including The Meir Mix (an interesting false cut), The Card Sorter (a visually arresting sequence in which a deck fluidly squares and unsquares at your fingertips), and the Slingshot Snapout (Meir’s sleight-of-hand method for causing a selection to shoot out from the pack).

Other highlights include "Signa-Fusion," a powerful routine in which two signed cards fuse together into one card with both signatures (this was the forerunner to and in some cases inspiration for many of today’s most popular signature-fusion effects); Joe Safuto’s "The Travelling Thumb," an impromptu removed-and-restored thumb trick that provides the added convincer of putting a ring on your thumb before it is removed, then restored; and "Ghostwriter," a intriguing effect in which the magician begins typing on an invisible typewriter (complete with accompanying typing sounds), then suddenly, he pulls a sheet of paper out of thin air as he mimes removing it from the spool. A number of presentational ideas are included for this, all of which are fine, but I have always felt that someone could come up with a really strong way to routine the effect that would turn it into a showpiece.

So what was the second installment in this series? A treatise on Gary Ouellet’s key-card principle called ProControl, published in 1988. But the contents of that book are so far removed from the original mandate of the series (i.e. "introduce new talent" and "publish material used to earn a living") that it should really have been part of the Masters of Magic series. Maybe Guy and Gary came to realize as time went on that young magicians of Meir’s caliber are simply hard to come by.

In any case, this book deserves your attention!

David Acer