In my most recent post, I discussed the Modern Magic extract that appeared in the January 10, 1876, issue of The Boys of New York. In this post, I’ll talk briefly about the Modern Magic extract that appeared in the issue of the following week, namely the January 17, 1876, issue. Once again, I am relying on a website of Villanova University (Falvey Library) in discussing The Boys of New York, and for the images below from The Boys of New York.
When compared to the separate volume of Modern Magic, the text from the January 10 issue ends about one third of the way down on page 311 of the book. The current extract (January 17) picks up where the earlier one left off. The corresponding text of the book ends about a third of the way down on page 313.
Again, I haven’t compared the text of The Boys of New York to the separate volume with any real care. (For the limited comparisons I have done, I have been using one or more digitized versions of the book on Google Books, since those are searchable, and far more convenient than using a volume from my collection. Also, it doesn’t impose handling on any of my books.)
However, it’s becoming clear to me that comparing the text in The Boys of New York to the text of the separate volume of Modern Magic probably is of very limited utility. The first paragraph of the present installment in The Boys of New York is very different from the first paragraph of the same portion as found in the book. While there isn’t too much in the way of likely edits or revisions that would surprise me, I would expect that any changes reflected in The Boys of New York would ordinarily be designed to truncate the text, or to Americanize it—or to renumber the figures. In the present case, the beginning of the text in The Boys of New York made references to “birdcages (of course of small size),” but that was not in the separate volume.
To me, that alteration seemed strange, and I figured that the text might simply be the version that had been printed in Every Boy’s Magazine—still by Hoffmann, but not the same as the text in the separate volume. I decided to try to compare that part of the text of The Boys of New York to the text of the serialized version as seen in Every Boy’s Annual (EBA). I couldn’t find that volume of EBA on Google Books (by searching for phrases from the possible revision language), so I looked through examples of EBA in my collection until I found the right volume. It turned out to be nominally the 1876 volume, most of which consists of issues of Every Boy’s Magazine (EBM) from 1875. If a volume with those issues is privately bound from issues that a reader accumulated, then there is no telling whether the binding will reflect 1876, or 1875, or something else. (There are actually other nuances, which maybe I’ll get into in the future, but I’m already pretty far off topic.)
Anyway, I found the relevant article. It starts on page 550 of my 1876 volume. And in fact, the first trick in that particular Modern Magic article was the first trick in the January 10, 1876, issue of The Boys of New York. This fact has a few implications, one or two of which may be resolved as I continue to go through the Modern Magic articles in The Boys of New York. But I’ll make a few relevant comments now.
First, it isn’t as though the people at The Boys of New York (TBONY) were combing through past numbers of Every Boy’s Magazine (or past volumes of EBA), looking for the most suitable material. A few factors are important here. The first (known) Modern Magic article in The Boys of New York started with the beginning of one of the articles in EBM, which would tend to be an arbitrary starting point, and not one determined by a discriminating evaluation of all of the material in that issue, let alone all of the material in the whole series of Modern Magic articles.
As a matter of fact, if TBONY had access to the entire run of Modern Magic articles up to that point, a far more logical starting point would be with simple card tricks, or perhaps coin tricks. Another thing: The EBM issue with the tricks that TBONY reprinted did not appear a long time before the reprinting in TBONY. This tends to suggest that someone at TBONY came into possession of an isolated issue of EBM and figured, “Hey, this article looks interesting. Let’s reprint it. We can break it into parts and run it over several issues.”
If the five articles I mentioned in the preceding post turn out to mirror the contents of that one Modern Magic article under discussion that I found in the 1876 EBA, that would be additional support for the foregoing. Since I am still in the process of looking the articles over for the first time, I can’t yet say whether that is the situation or not. (And of course, there may have been other Modern Magic extracts in TBONY, earlier or later than those I mentioned.)
I’ll talk a little more about the EBA version later in this post.
Well, enough palaver for the moment. Below are a few images from the January 17, 1876, issue of The Boys of New York. [“Attribution: Digital Library@Villanova University.”] After that, I’ll show two images from my 1876 Every Boy’s Annual:
Below is the beginning of the January 17 segment. It says “By Professor Hoffman.” The misspelling of Hoffmann’s name meant that one likely would not find the piece by searching for “Professor Hoffmann.” I left in the letter to the editor. The Boys of New York included a lot of interaction between the readers and the editor.
Below is the beginning of the text from TBONY, which may be compared to the text of the EBA version of basically the same segment, below it. I see a few differences in punctuation, but nothing else.
Below is the entirety of the text on page 552, from the 1876 EBA.
That’s all for this post!
—Tom Sawyer
June 27, 2023
The Armchair Bibliographer 