Conjuring Credits

The Origins of Wonder

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Count-Spell Stratagem

While this is widely attributed to Stewart James, used in his marketed effect “Evolution of a Dream”, 1930, Karl Fulves discovered an earlier example of the stratagem by Walter Gibson in his “New Spelling Trick” in The Magician Monthly, Vol. 14 No. 8, July 1918, p. 106, with Gibson's simplified version appearing in same journal the following year, The Magician Monthly, Vol. 15 No. 6, May 1919, p. 72. Fulves reprints the second version in Prolix, No. 2, Dec. 2006, p. 99.