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Playing cards had been introduced and the conjurer put them to good use, as he did also with the tricks of the Asiatic and Oreintal conjurers among which one using an empty cloth bag, from which several real eggs and a live hen or cockerel were produced, still remains a classic to this day. This trick became a favourite of Fawkes of whom such has been written. Here was a conjurer who only commencing his conjuring career at the end of the seventeenth century came to London but with his private soirees he not only presented the famous egg-bag trick but featured tricks with cards and dice and exhibited a wonderful clock that, when touched by the hand, would play many tunes as well as imitating instruments and bird sounds.
The Fawkes whose exact age is not known died in 1731 leaving to his widow a fortune at that time.
The eighteenth century was to see the emergence of a larger magical canvas and for such, one must look to the Italian Giovanni Guiseppe Pinetti. While in the main, the entertainers of the day who specialised in conjuring had performed in the streets, at fairs, or in private rooms, using mostly small-type magic, Pinetti, with magnificent and ornate settings brought magic to the theatre.With his entouage, pinetti travelled far. In 1784 he was in England featuring an early form of Second Sight and breaking the London run for one night to give a Royal Command performance before King George III at Windsor Castle. He travelled to Portugal, Germany and finally in 1800 to Russia where at the comparatively young age of fifty, he was to die.
During his years of performing Pinetti was to suffer from the many writers who attempted to expose his tricks, these being quite new to the public. Pinetti was a great publicist, always adopting the richest clothes, riding in the best of carriages, and using every means available to exploit his talents. One such trick that has been used by many conjurers since depends on the performer to approach a baker's stall and upon taking a bread roll and opening it, find a gold piece inside. This would be repeated while crowds gathered around. Whether or not real gold pieces were used and whether as legend has it he distributed them to the assembled company, we shall never know. Most probably the coins used were token disks bearing the name of Pinetti.
Indeed many were to follow the path initiated by Pinetti and with the coming of the nineteenth century one heras of Blitz who was born in Hamburg, Germany came to England as a small boy and with the contemporary tricks of the day added to magic a new dimension, namely that of humour. He was to be welcomed just as much in the United States as in England and in his book Fifty Years in the Magic Circle one gets the impression of his work and the success that attended it.
At this point in time, there were to be heard the accounts of Oriental, Asiatic, and North American magicians, the first two mentioned with tricks that would soon be in the European repertoire, and the last named with their unusual tent-shaking phenomena.
From the East, already there had arrived a trick that was to become one of the great classics of magic, popularly known as the Chinese Linking Rings. In this effect a number of solid metal rings would link and unlink in a truly magical fashion.
One trick that Blitz capitalized on was that where a bullet loaded into a gun was fired at the performer, a dangerous trick indeed, and one that has caused many deaths, including that of the famous Chung Ling Soo.
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