Spelling: Letters Or Numbers? by Renzo Grosso

I saw the first spelling effects a long time ago, studying Aldo Colombini's DVDs; they were in English and I gave up almost immediately, due to the great difference in seed letters and numbers: from diamonds to diamonds there was an ocean. I saw, I appreciated them ... and then I gave up. Some time later, trying and trying again, a light bulb came on: I thought I had invented my spelling in Italian; beautiful exceptional. Later I discovered that I had not really invented anything, there were dozens and hundreds of similar and ... almost the same. Then, continuing to study the great masters, I began to collect notes and coincidences, and I took the opportunity to "clean up" in this publication, in the hope that they will be useful to someone and that they can generate yet another coincidences and effects.

The synthesis of an effect with the spelling is very simple: I make sure that the chosen card is "forced" into a position and then, with the spelling, I reveal it. It goes without saying that there are infinite ways to force a position in a group of cards and that I can use names or phrases to spell the cards for the final revelation: here you will find some ideas and the mechanism that governs them: infinite others can be created with imagination and desire to look for a new story to tell.

In this ebook you will find:

• THE CALENDAR AND THE MOON: At the end of the effect you have to pass 11 cards from top to bottom: I'm lucky, Grosso Renzo are exactly 11 letters. If neither you nor the viewer has an 11-letter name and surname, you can use such a long word as Abracadabra, Magically... or whatever you prefer.
• MAGIC, BUT ONLY WITH YOUR DECK OF CARDS: The effect can also be proposed to a group of people. Each one will count as many cards as the letters of their name and surname, each one will remove a number of cards at will: therefore all absolutely random conditions, but a "very strong" conclusion: everyone will find their own card.
• THE CREATIVE HAMBURGER: I have a friend who is a Hamburger fanatic: the first thing he does, when visiting any city, is to check where the Hamburgerias are, and then visit them one by one for lunch. And then, being a good illusionist, he stops at the tables to propose card effects; what we see has even been awarded by an association of restaurateurs. Let's see it together.
• Two effects that use a principle of parity which, from Martin Gardner onwards, has been used in countless versions, always beautiful and interesting: FRUIT SALAD and GREAT FRUIT MACEDONIA
• THE CHARM OF THE CARDS: citing the major arcana of the tarot, which are 21, the position of the chosen card is forced; the counts and subsequent overturning of the cards simply serve not to change the order of the cards.
• A HAND OF BLACK JACK: Each card game has its own unique history that dates back hundreds and hundreds of years. It is said that the ancestor of Black Jack was born around 1700, in France, where a game called Vingt-en-Un (which means twenty-one) was played in French casinos. Probably that was not the only ancestor of blackjack, but certainly its origins, known to us, start from there. The English name BlackJack comes from a particular hand of 21: when a player received the ace of spades and the jack of spades at the first hand, then he also obtained an extra payment: therefore the term Black Jack comes from this type of ideal hand.
• IDENTITY PARADE: Identity parade is a procedure for recognizing a criminal, performed by subjecting a line of suspects to the visual examination of eyewitnesses or victims of a crime, placing the latter in safety in a contiguous environment, protected to sight thanks to a system of false mirrors or tinted glass. Despite everything it seems a good method, and we will try to verify if, for us, it can be truly reliable.
• MANHATTAN TRANSFER: John Dos Passos in Manhattan Transfer, portrays the cynical and ruthless soul of the city of New York in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and tells the shattering of the American Dream against the cliff of a model of civilization which has no other limit than the accumulation of wealth and the oppression of the individual over the individual: In this experiment, we will simulate a reality in which changes are decided, by chance, by an "external" entity (the spectator ) but, despite all the co-protagonist (the performer), will be able to give a meaning and a logical conclusion to the story.

1st edition 2022, PDF 29 pages.
word count: 6334 which is equivalent to 25 standard pages of text