Throwing Cards To The Audience By John Mulholland

[Reprinted from The Sphinx Vol. XXXV Number Three, page 77]

     Howard Thurston became interested in magic because of having seen Alexander Herrmann’s show and it is quite natural that he should have been impressed with Herrmann’s feat of scaling’ cards, for Herrmann made it so impressive that today those who saw him are apt of all his magic first to recall his throwing cards up to the gallery. Herrmann was, perhaps, the first magician to scale cards out to the audience. At any rate, he was the first to make that a feature of his show. 

Whether or not Thurston practiced this feat because of his admiration for Herrmann, it is true that no one since Herrmann is associated in the minds of the people as much with throwing the cards, and it was always a feature of Thurston’s show. It is particularly interesting that Howard Thurston and Alexander Herrmann did not perform the feat in the same way. They both used cards of much heavier stock than the ordinary playing card. This gave the cards added weight, which permitted them to be thrown much further than the standard playing cards could be thrown. 

     Howard Thurston gripped one end of the card between his first and second fingers and threw it by a snap of his wrist. Herrmann gripped the card about a half inch from the end and midway between the sides, with the tip of his second finger and the ball of his thumb. The first finger held the corner of the card, so as to give it an added spin when it was thrown. The actual throwing, that is the little snapping’ flick of the wrist, Herrmann did in the same way as Thurston. Besides the 

interest the audience had in seeing the cards thrown accurately and far, the cards were prized as souvenirs, as both Herrmann and Thurston always had their portraits on their cards. 

In India in one of the first conversations which I had with Mohammed Bakhsh, the cleverest of the East Indian conjurers, he tried to impress on me that he was familiar with Occidental magic, and a friend of Occidental magicians. As proof of this he offered me a cracked and grimy card which he carried in his wallet. He showed it to me as confidently as a schoolboy shows his first diploma. 

      It was an advertising card of Howard Thurston; one of similar thousands which Thurston had thrown to the audiences on his tour of India twenty-five years before. It was interesting to find that the name of Thurston spelled magic in the land where magic is supposed to be in the very air, quite as much as for forty years it has meant magic to millions of Americans.

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