John Ramsay’s Cylinder and Coins by Victor Farelli

A classic routine explained in detail with almost 50 photographs.

Excerpt from the preface by John Ramsay:

It is now over fifty years since I started to experiment with the Cap and Pence trick, and I have worked out several methods of using the standard apparatus.

The present routine, lucidly and minutely explained by Victor Farelli, is not the result of a “brain wave” it was gradually evolved by a process of trial and error, and I trust that the reader will decide to study it thoroughly and that he will add it to his programme.

For the last thirty years, or more, it has been one of my favourite close work effects, and I have shown it to some of the world’s most famous magicians in America, including Al Baker, T. Nelson Downs, Max Holden, Jean Hugard, Ralph Hull, Nate Leipzig, Sid Lorraine and John Mulholland, and to hundreds of conjurers in Scotland, England and on the continent of Europe. Not one of them claimed to have followed the “moves” or to have understood the exact method of working.

Apart from the coin manipulations described in Sections X to XVIII, there is nothing really difficult in the trick, or beyond the skill of the average magician. The manipulations in question are certainly hard to acquire, but they can be replaced by sleights with which the reader is already familiar, without detracting from the actual climax of the trick, or making it less entertaining.