Trade of the Tricks: Inside the Magician’s Craft by Graham M. Jones (review)

Trade of the Tricks is an ethnography of the world of stage magic in France and the community of experts who perform it. Jones draws on theories of communities of practice and speech communities to argue how close analysis of the “expert register” of magician’s language and practices is “evidence of the larger world of backstage activity that goes into preparing oneself—technically, artistically, and psychologically—to perform in front of an audience” (p. 28). The structure of the magic scene affects the production of magic as a genre of entertainment and its reproduction as a social activity. Magic is made possible by the social organization and valuation of expert knowledge. Ultimately, Trade of the Tricks provides one of the best elaborations of the sheer efficacy of apprenticeship as a method. In so doing, Graham M. Jones provides insights into an exclusive community of experts.

To develop how magic talk is formed by broader structures, the book works through Jones’s journey from novice to certified magician in France’s largest magic organization (chap. 1). With this introduction, he shows how magicians circulate secrets and negotiate intellectual property rights (chap. 2) and discusses diverse forms of performances (chap. 3). Jones examines the career trajectories of magicians (chap. 4) and the debated place of magic as art or “high culture” as well as the real consequences such designations have for magicians (chap. 5). Historical accounts and vivid stories of magicians in and out of performance are interspersed throughout each chapter, adding a rich and productive layer of depth to the reported speech and practices of professional magicians.

Magic is a gift that magicians perform to their audiences, but training in magic is a process of making that performance, and the sociality behind it, inscrutable to the observer. More than mere quicker-than-the-eye gestures, magic is predicated on strategy. Jones argues that his study is not about embodied skills but rather the “cunning intelligence that inhabits [magicians’] limbs and digits” (p. 36). Tricks are based equally on manual dexterity and on the careful guidance of audience attention, reactions, and reasoning. Famous and up-and-coming magicians assemble as a community at professional magic clubs in Paris to discuss news, to joke, to compete, and to assist in the creation of new tricks. The “locker-room mentality” (p. 41) of these clubs makes them especially exclusive spaces primarily comprised of men who have proven their right to even attend. Jones documents how the very structure of magic is often gendered, premised on “heterosexual masculine signs in which women, when they do appear, figure as the objects rather than the agents of illusion” (p. 132). This masculine structure also lends itself to gendered critiques through over-the-top performances and stage banter between male magicians and their female assistants. Furthermore, the community is undergoing a demographic shift as more and more women enter the field. Jones’s discussions of the growing number of women magicians and the fascinating emergence of “queer magic” clearly depict a world undergoing change. By tracking the tribulations and experiences of magicians on and off the stage, Jones creates a fully empathetic image of magicians as experts who, despite their lewdness, mostly want to bring joy and mystery to everyone around them.

One especially interesting section is on repercussions of the mass availability of magic tricks on the Internet. Jones argues that while magic is increasingly accessible, mastering magic is inherently different from simply reproducing a trick. Instead, magic involves knowledge of how to make a trick “storyable” and how to practice subtle skills such as misdirection. Magicians are, however, threatened by the proliferation of TV shows and videos that expose a trick’s secrets, thereby rendering it unperformable. Closely related to this struggle are issues of intellectual property, especially around questions of who owns a trick. At magic clubs, magicians “tip” their tricks to one...