Magic. 1400s–1950s (PRIX FAVORABLE)
Beautiful art book containing wonderful poster images and history of magic.
Just to clarify some of the differences between this and the earlier book:
1. The original book had 650 pages, this edition has 544.
2. This book is also in 3 languages (English, French and German).
It still weighs around 14lbs. and is a large format art book. (Page height is nearly 15.5 inches). It's gorgeous, fairly heavy, and I'm happy to have it! Honestly, if I hadn't read about the earlier version of the book I would never guess this was "scaled down". It's still a very impressive book!
From http://www.wildabouthoudini.com/2013/06/magic-1400s-1950s-released-in-new.html
UPDATE: Re the differences between this and the larger edition, the following is from the editor of the book, Noel Daniel:
"The smaller version is meant to offer readers the chance to discover the wonderful world of magic for a great price. To be able to offer a smaller version of the first edition (the larger book) at a trade price, we did need to reduce its physical size, which meant also reducing its page count and therefore the image count. Even though the smaller version is reduced by ca. 150 images of the original 900, it is still a fantastic, illustrated overview of 500 years of magic. This material has never been brought together in this manner before, and much of it has never been published. I spent many, many months personally visiting archives and incredible private collections to select these images from the original 30,000 that I gathered. Both the large and smaller versions are important publishing events in the history of magic.
In terms of the images that I cut from the original larger size, of course, it was very hard, as all of the images mean a great deal to me. However, I tried to retain critical images that I felt readers would like to see, while cutting images that perhaps were repeated in some aspect or contained information that could be found in other images."