West Port Book Festival and other news

So happily I can now reveal a couple of things that I’ve been keeping under my hat recently, one is that A Sage of the Stage, not a Beast in a Cage (I’m suddenly starting to regret choosing such a long title for this series since I’ve now had to type it so many times!) will go on tour from September as part of an exhibition organised by the Touring Exhibitions Unit of Highland Council called Now You See It! which will start off on 19th September at the Swanson Gallery in Thurso, moving on to Inverness Museum and Art Gallery on 14th November and then finally onto the St. Fergus Gallery in Wick on 16th January 2010. I’m really delighted to have been asked to take part in this magic themed exhibition – I think it’s going to be fantastic! I’ll be putting up more information about it as and when I get it.

The other thing is that I’m going to be doing a talk (eek) at the West Port Book Festival in Edinburgh on 14th August, along with my good friend, magician, musician and book collector, Gordon Bruce. I’m thrilled to be appearing at all but to get to do this talk along with Gordon is really quite amazing for me. Gordon is a legend in the magic world! So no pressure then *gulp*. I’ll be talking about the learned animals series and what went into creating it, as well as telling a little bit about the subject matter and the books that I used and that inspired me to do it in the first place. Some of the pieces will also be on show throughout the three days of the festival at various venues as part of the Magic Trail. Also appearing as part of the trail will be fabulous magicians in the form of Eireann Leverett, Neil Stirton and Paul Besly.

The programme is out now and should be available at all shops in the Grassmarket and the West Port and probably anywhere in Edinburgh where flyers and leaflets abound. You can also view all of the events on the website.

West Port Book Festival programme – front cover

Dummy post

Bored Ludic has been posting a lot about music hall acts and ventriloquists recently since our trip to Blackpool Magic Convention where we went to an excellent talk about the history of music hall. Prompted by this I decided to see if there were many female ventriloquism acts from that era and that led me to Terri Rogers, who, it turns out – conveniently for me – was also a magician and magical inventor, helping people like Paul Daniels and David Copperfield develop stage illusions. If you can manage to overlook the inherent creepiness of ventriloquist dummies then check out the clip, which I think is interesting from the point of view of female ventriloquist doing male dummy voice (Terri did in fact start life as Ivan Southgate, which I think makes it all the more interesting). I’m really looking forward to finding out more about her magic now.