Michael Close - Complete Workers Ebook.pdf - M - animga

I NTRODUCTION TO

T HE W ORKERS E BOOK

W hat are the technical terms for the protuberances and indentations found around the edges of a

jigsaw puzzle piece? Tenons and mortises? Bulbs and sockets? Innies and outies? Because the sub-

ject will come up in just a bit, and because I want to appear to be as educated as possible, I will refer

to them as ﬁgity-bits and fjords.

I realize that this is an odd way to begin the introduction to a series of magic books, but all will be-

come clear shortly. I am writing this in December 2004 from my parents’ home in Lebanon, Indiana,

a small town about 30 miles northwest of Indianapolis. This is the town I where grew up, went to

high school, and ﬁrst tried out the tricks from the books I ordered from Dick Stoner’s Magic Shop

in Fort Wayne. Lisa and I (along with Pablo and Murray, the Chihuahuas) drove to Indiana from Las

Vegas. This is the ﬁrst family Christmas we’ve had since I moved to Vegas almost seven years ago,

and Lisa and I are very much looking forward to spending time with my folks, my sisters and their

husbands, and our nieces and nephew. ( Workers 4 was dedicated to my nephew Josh, who was born

at the time the book was published.) We avoided snow during our drive east, but it snowed the day

after we arrived, so we will have a white Christmas, a fairly rare event for central Indiana.

By its very nature, “coming home for Christmas” involves the act of coming home, and we all know

what conventional wisdom says about that. For the past few years, when I would come to Indiana for

a visit, I’d drive around Lebanon trying to ﬁgure out how I still ﬁt in. Considering that I had moved

away from this little town in the early 1970s, this was as silly a quest as one could imagine. But I

tried anyway. I was a puzzle piece, looking for a familiar aperture, but discovering that all the ﬁgity-

bits and fjords had subtly rearranged themselves, and I no longer ﬁt in. Each time I left, I returned to

Vegas with a sadness that I could not explain.

This trip, however, is different. This time I see this little town for what it is now – simply a place

that people who are important to me call home. On earlier trips, I thought I had lost something, and

I drove around town trying to ﬁnd it. Of course, I hadn’t lost anything at all. When I lived here, I ﬁt

in. When I left, the puzzle adjusted, the empty outline of my piece ﬁlled in, and life went on. And

that is exactly as it should be. Fortunately for me, there is still a tiny, malleable, section of the puzzle

– a smallish house on the corner of what used to be two country roads. When I walk through the

he Workers Seri

front door, the puzzle welcomes me, shifting to accommodate my current ﬁgity-bits and fjords, and

I nestle comfortably into place. It isn’t an exact ﬁt, but it’s good enough, and during the Christmas

season, with snow on the ground, it is a ﬁne thing indeed.

For me, reading through the books of the Workers series was a bit like revisiting my hometown after

a long absence, and it brought back lots of memories, some good, some bad. To be honest, I don’t

read my old books, watch my old videos, or read my past review columns. There’s simply too much

else going on. Consequently, it had been many years since I’d gone through the ﬁve volumes. The

experience was like paging through a scrapbook ﬁlled with word-pictures, capturing moments of my

life frozen in time. To my delight, I discovered that the routines and the essays have held up very

well. To my surprise, I discovered that I have changed considerably in the years since the ﬁfth book

was published; I found that many of my published presentations wouldn’t ﬁt me at all. Apparently,

my ﬁgity-bits and fjords have shifted.

All the material in the Workers series was created and performed in and around Indianapolis. The

books were written in Carmel, Indiana, from 1990 to 1996. This was a dark period in my life, and

looking back, I’m amazed that I was able to produce these books at all. I carried a lot of pent-up an-

ger during this time, and, unfortunately, that anger manifested itself in my performances, personal in-

teractions, and perhaps even in the pages of the Workers books. I wish (for many reasons) that I had

handled things differently back then, but we can’t change the past, we can only learn from it. I guess

my point is that if you met me during that time, and you walked away from the encounter thinking,

“That guy’s a jerk,” you might not have been wrong.

Now, let’s move on to the main topic, this ebook edition of the Workers series. For many years I’ve

wanted to reissue these books in an improved format. The books were created during the infancy of

home desktop publishing, and it shows. I wrote the books, proofed them, posed for the pre-illustra-

tive photos, and laid out the books, using the computer tools I had, which were crude. In addition, I

published these books myself. I took the master copies to a printer, had photocopies made, and plas-

tic-comb bound them by hand. Because of this, I wanted the books to have as few pages as possible.

The type size is tiny, the illustrations are small, and the layout is cramped. There is a lot of informa-

tion packed into these books, but the user interface is not as friendly as it could be.

Earlier this year, Lisa and I released Closely Guarded Secrets , an ebook that incorporated text, pho-

tographs, and video clips in way that was designed to maximize the learning experience. Lisa de-

signed a layout that was absolutely lovely, and, when printed out, produced a very handsome book.

With the knowledge gained from that project, we decided it was time to tackle the Workers books.

We knew it would be a big task, but we had no idea how much time would eventually be involved.

The ﬁrst problem was that four of the ﬁve books had been produced on computer systems that no

longer existed. I did have master copies of all the pages, but all these pages had to be scanned and

then put through an Optical Character Recognition program. The OCR program did a good job

handling the task, except when it came to the patter for the tricks. I had italicized all the patter, and

this, combined with the tiny typeface, caused the OCR program to choke. All the patter for the ﬁrst

four books was basically garbage, and had to be retyped. The ﬁfth book was done on a PC, and the

Microsoft Word docs existed, making it easier to update.

Introduction to the Ebook

The ﬁrst step was to import all the text into Adobe InDesign and then print out a copy that could be

edited. Editing was my job. Since ﬁnishing Workers 5 , I have written approximately a million words

in my capacity as product reviewer for MAGIC magazine. I discovered that in that time I have be-

come a better writer. Therefore, my editing consisted of ﬁnding mistakes generated by the OCR pro-

gram, ﬁxing typos and omissions that I missed in the original manuscripts, and cleaning up my old

writing. I made a conscious decision not to alter the tone of the books or to make revisionist changes

to the text. My goal was simply clarity of instruction.

(I was a little embarrassed to discover just how many typos and omissions occur in the original

books. In some cases, the words “left” and “right” had been transposed, or references to illustra-

tions had been omitted. No one had ever pointed these out to me. I envision two scenarios: either my

friends were very kind, or no one has really read these books. I’m hoping my friends were just kind.)

At this point I read all my corrections to Lisa, who typed them into the manuscript.

My next job was adding annotations, which included further information, clariﬁcations, and expla-

nations of inside jokes. These annotations are bracketed and are in blue type, so they will stand out

from the original text. Quite a bit of information has been added, and I hope that these additions will

enhance your understanding and enjoyment of the series.

Finally, Lisa added the illustrations, which had to be scanned and cleaned up in Photoshop, and ﬁnal-

ized the layout. The ﬁve books now run to 640 pages, an increase of about 170 pages over the origi-

nal manuscripts.

Here are a few more salient points. Unlike Closely Guarded Secrets , we have decided not to incorpo-

rate video clips. There are two reasons for this. First, the series was not written with video in mind.

To incorporate video properly, I would have had to completely rewrite the books, and this was not

my intention. Second, a video resource for this material already exists. In May of 1998, I recorded

almost all of the Workers material for L&L Publishing. These videos have been released on four

DVDs titled The Ultimate Workers Collection , and they are reasonably priced. If you wish to supple-

ment your learning with video, they are an excellent resource. I encourage you to print out these

books. This can be easily done on your home printer, or you can take the disc to Kinko’s and have

them do it for you. The ReadMe ﬁle explains how to print out the manuscript. This ﬁle also explains

that as a legitimate purchaser you have the right to print out a copy for your personal use.

Because these books are now being distributed in an electronic medium, it would be very easy to

make copies for your friends. I would hope that you won’t. As you have read, this project took a

monumental amount of work, and I trust that you will respect that. Thank you in advance for your

consideration

If there is a theme that runs through the Workers series, it is that your magic and the way you per-

form it should be an expression of your life. Much of my life is expressed in these books. Like this

introduction, the content is more personal than most magic books, and that is an important aspect of

the series. As I began to write the annotations, it occurred to me that of all the billions of people on

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