(Hocus Pocus) | Magic tricks

(Hocus Pocus)

The Whole Art of Legerdemain, or Hocus Pocus Laid Open and Explained by those Renowned Masters Sena Sama, Hamed Ben-Ali … Baltimore: C. V. Nickerson, 1831

12mo (152 x 89 mm). Handcolored folding engraved frontispiece, woodcut illustration on title-page verso depicting a caricature of 2 men eating and of a beadle detaining a hawker; some scattered foxing and spotting, lacks a repeat of the folding plate between pp. 36 and 37 called for in Toole Stott. Pictorial brown boards (advertisement for the bookseller Joseph N. Lewis on rear cover); somewhat worn, lower board detached, losses to spine.

A relatively early American edition of the popular Hocus Pocus book, which was first published in Philadelphia by Mathew Carey in 1795. A variant issue, this copy differs from the that in the McManus Collection at the Library of Congress, which is bound in green boards with black lettering and a woodcut illustration of animals eating at a table on the verso of the title-page.

REFERENCE:

Toole Stott 719