The Magic Bibliography site is a convenient searchable database with information about over 23,000 magic books from 1587 to the present, plus a helpful collection of searchable research works and other materials. It's been designed as a simple research tool to help magicians and historians easily look up essential detail of bookss, trace the source of magic techniques, browse for study materials, and many other uses.

No, our Magic Bibliography Site searchable database has been created for looking up detailed text-only facts about each book. In addition to our main database, however, we do also provide an extensive selection of full-view searchable PDFs of classic magic bibliographies and auction catalogs that you can freely read and enjoy.

The book listings include as many details as possible, including author, co-author, editor, pseudonym/real name, translator, date published, publisher, location, binding, dimensions, number of pages, cover color, special elements like slipcases and ribbon bookmarks, numbers of limited editions, signatures of authors, up to four subjects, language, and more.

Not at all. This is a digital database that contains its entire contents, so you can precisely search its text. You won't need to navigate through hundreds of magnified PDF pages.

Yes, limited copies of the three-volume deluxe edition are still available on our Miracle Factory site. Visit The Miracle Factory to order your set.

Auction catalogs, dealer lists, and book catalogs contain important historic and physical information about magic books and their value, and in many cases excellent images of the actual works.

Yes, it's the clever vintage artwork from mentalist Joseph Dunninger's bookplate and advertising material with a face formed from a wizard and an open book. We've always loved this image and felt it summed up our magic-book mission.

Just purchase your one-year access by selecting the Subscribe link in the top menu or other similar subscription links. You'll be asked to provide your payment method, then you'll set a username and password to log into the site. One year from your purchase, your subscription will automatically renew at the same price for another year unless you decide to cancel before renewal.

In the top menu, at the far right, you'll find a drop-down menu under the link marked "Account." In the drop-down menu, you'll see a clickable "Sign In" link to a page where you can enter your username and password.

Your account is based here at The Magic Bibliography Site, but all our subscription payments are processed through the same system as our main company, The Miracle Factory.

Yes, cancel at any time during your first year so it won't renew. Go to the account settings to cancel. We do not return partially used subscription payments from canceled subscriptions.

Send us an email at support@magicbib.com and we'll try to help you as soon as possible.

In the top menu, at the far right, you'll find a drop-down menu under the link marked "Account." In the drop-down menu, you'll see a clickable "Sign In" link to a page where you can enter your username and password. The same menu has a choice marked "Log Out."

Click the link marked "Account" at the far right In the top menu. Here you can change your password, view your subscription, and see other account details.

At the top of each page is a menu with links to "Basic Search" and "Advanced Search" which will lead you to our search engines.

Use the Basic Search page to quickly look for any words in any order in our Magic Bibliography Site database.

Be patient. Sometimes it will take a few moments for our database to find your results.

When your search results appear, you can click on each individual entry to open it as a new page displaying the book's full information.

On the Advanced Search page, you can find any word but also filter your searches by author, title, date, language, and/or subject if you wish. Just click the Search button when you're ready. To start over, click on the "Reset" button.

The lower search form on the Advanced Search page also lets you find the words you're searching for in their exact order.

Yes, you can filter any search by using one or more combinations of controls to limit your results to specific authors, words in the title, date range, language, or topic.

If there are additional pages of search results, you'll find small blue numbers at the bottom of the search page. Click on any page number or on the right-pointing arrow after the final page number to move to the next page. On subsequent pages, click the far-left arrow to visit the previous page.

For searches with sizable results, you'll also see the word "Last," which you can click to jump to the final page, and it's followed by a second right-pointing arrow that you can click as well to jump to the final page.

The ID number noted after a book's title is just part of our internal bookkeeping and has no relevance to the physical book.

The search results are listed alphabetically by author's last name.

However, some of our advanced search features have a few quirks. After searching in the Author field, for example, the search results will first list those books written with a co-author or editor, followed by works by the author alone.

No, but they're individually searchable with their own controls, which are separate from the Simple Search and Advanced Search engines.

The entries are mainly based on the expansive Karr Collection, so a number of entries have notes about personal inscriptions or the number of a specific copy. Others entries mention books from renowned collectors' libraries, signatures of prominent former owners, famed magicians' bookplates, and similarly interesting minutiae. Rather than omit these details, they've been included since they often can provide extra insights about a book's history.

It means that some of the details may not be accurate because we have not personally measured and examined an actual copy of the book. If you don't see that disclaimer in an entry, it means that it's among over 15,000 books in our database that are in the Karr Collection, so they have been carefully measured by hand and all details have been noted in a physical copy, along with a few others that have been verified in person at the Copperfield Library and other collections.

First, we'll point out that bibliographies normally do not list any subjects at all. We feel that the contents of a magic book are essential information, so we've done our best to list the basic genres of each book to give a general idea of the topics within, but it was not a priority of this bibliography to list every possible subject in a book. 

Our database focuses on sleight-of-hand-type magic and the illusionary art of the stage magician, along with relevant books on allied arts.

Honestly, there's no comparison on almost every level. We bring you by far the most extensive and detailed bibliography ever compiled, based on the number of works, focus on performance magic, accuracy and depth, original research on information not found elsewhere, thoroughness of listing every edition of a book, and clarity. If there's anything we've left out in the database, it's the very technical bibliographer's notations for the composition of the various leaves and specific page counts of advertising sections, but interested researchers can check our Additional Bibliographies section for Toole-Stott and other sources that include this minutiae. For more insights into how our database compares to others, click here to see our handy Magic Bibliography Comparison Chart.

Many of the older bibliographies veer off-topic into works on the occult, spiritualism, and con men without any connection to magic.

We've made judgment calls to include a few non-magic books that we find relevant to the author, publisher, or magic history in general. For example, Will Goldston's 1911 juggling book Juggling Secrets is included here, as well as works he published on ventriloquism and other performance arts, because we feel that these books are part of the history of Goldston and his book business.

The Magic Bibliography Site was created to focus on English-language works. Beyond the extensive foreign works in the Karr Collection, no effort has been made to gather information on the many titles in other languages absent from our searchable database. However, information on other prominent foreign works will be found in our More Sources section of Bibliographies, including a number that exclusively cover foreign magic works.

If you have new books or updated information, you can let us know with our convenient Submission Form.

Yes, we gladly accept free donations of magic books. We’ll note all the details of each book ourselves and if they’re not in our database, we’ll add them to our entries. All donations are final and will not be returned, and we do not reimburse shipping costs.

Please send your book(s) to:
Todd Karr
1909 S. Harvard Blvd
Los Angeles, CA 90018 USA