Terms
Illusion Library is a home for the classic books of magic whose copyright has lapsed: Tarbell, Hoffmann, Erdnase, Bobo, Annemann and more, newly set for reading on any screen, with every drawing in its place. Each trick links to the sleights it needs, and the sleights to the tricks they open, so a beginner can learn in short sittings and a performer can go straight to the method. For people who want to learn magic, launching in 2027.
The books and this edition
The books on our shelf are in the public domain, and you are free to read them wherever you find them. What you find here is our own work: the choice and arrangement of the pieces, the corrected texts, the drawings set in their places, the links between tricks and sleights, the paths and the design. Together they are a database made with substantial investment, protected in the Netherlands and the European Union by the Databankenwet (Directive 96/9/EC) and, where it applies, by copyright.
What you may do
- Read, study, practise and perform what you learn here.
- Quote a short passage, with credit to Illusion Library.
- Print a page for your own practice.
- Describe the library and link to this front page anywhere.
What we ask you not to do
- Copy the collection, or a substantial part of it, or republish our pages.
- Collect pages with scripts, crawlers or other automated tools.
- Share your access code or pass with others.
We may slow down or close access that is used to collect pages.
Text and data mining
We reserve text and data mining of the library under Article 4(3) of Directive (EU) 2019/790, as set out in Article 15o of the Dutch Copyright Act. The reservation is stated in a machine-readable way in robots.txt, in the tdm-reservation tag and at /.well-known/tdmrep.json. Search and answer services are welcome to read and index this page, the front page and our llms.txt, so that people looking for a place to learn magic can find us.