Card and Magic Tricks/Introduction

Magic is an ancient art. Magic as a performance art per se is documented far back to ancient Egypt. Today, many magicians enjoy notoriety as both stage and television celebrities. Others work in restaurants and bars, while others work on cruise ships and similar venues. In recent years, so-called 'Street' magic has seen a strong resurgence in popularity.

Focus
This book serves as a basic introduction to the performance of magic. More specialized and advanced titles appear elsewhere on Wikibooks and thousands of titles pertaining to advance techniques used by magicians are available via commercial magic dealers.

In modern language, magic falls into a few broad categories, those being:
 * Stage magic
 * Close up magic
 * Stand up magic (sometimes referred to as Parlour magic)
 * Street magic

Each of these forms of magic have been performed (in one context or another) for many centuries throughout the world.