Spirited Pasteboards by Leo Boudreau

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Max Maven writes in the introduction to Spirited Pasteboards:

There is an ancient Chinese curse which goes, "May you live in interesting times." Bearing this in mind, it is not without some playful malice that I inform you that you are now holding a tome which is extremely interesting.

As with the author's previous book, Psimatrika, the work in this text is primarily based upon stacking arrangements which generate information via binary codes. The principle is by no means new, but in its seventy-year history as a conjuring method it has remained little-known and woefully under-explored.

Mr. Boudreau clearly wishes to remedy that, with a vengeance.

The material in this volume is almost exclusively done with playing cards. However, don't be misled into thinking that this is simply another book of card tricks. Rather, in this book playing cards are used as a frame-of-reference for the author's adventurous speculations. Once the methodological foundations are understood, a far wider range of applications will present themselves. (For that matter, purely as card tricks there are some hot items to be found here.)

At first, much of this material may strike the reader as being infuriatingly complex and confusing. I would urge perseverance; the rewards are well worth the effort. After absorbing the ideas in this book, you may never look at a pack of cards in quite the same way again.

Many of the effects Leo describes are based on what mathematicians call a 'De Bruijn cycle' and coding specialists call a 'Gray code' or 'bracelet code'. It has unique properties which are very useful for the mentalist.

first edition, 1987, Arlington, VA; 234 pages.

Table of Contents

Mountain Valley Stack

Calling Cards

All Decked Out

A Hi-Tech Princess

Ultrasense

Stellar Connections

Back Track

White Noise

Bracelet Redux

A Sense of Value

Second Impression

Sudden Impact

Extempore

Suiting Up

Karmatrix

Heady Stuff

Take Three

Estimation & Noise

The Multicard Locator

Any Card at any Number

The Calibrated Deck

The Cutting Edge

No Facial Stack

A Threesome

Cutting The Suits

Cutting the Values

Quick Counts

The Unseen

A Corollary

Matchmaking

Twin Decks

A Baker's Dozen

Strange Relations

The Rhine Test

Psychic Gambol

52 Scatter

The Black Castle

Easy Poker

A Force of Sorts

Count Down

Assorted Cards

Stop Action

Significant Bits

Core Memory

Coluria '87

Anything Goes

Numerology, Etc.

Two Person Telepathy

The Silent Partner

Talking Heads

Melange

word count: 81179 which is equivalent to 324 standard pages of text