The Fred Braue Notebooks – Volumes #1-8 Set

The fabled and extremely rare Fred Braue Notebooks, in mint condition! This series was originally meant to contain a total of 15 volumes, but Jeff Busby only ever published 8 of them.

The 8-Volume set also includes a FREE 235-page PDF download of The Unpublished Fred Braue Notebooks!

Several years ago, Conjuring Arts acquired the remnants of the Jeff Busby collection. In that collection was the source material for the famed Fred Braue notebooks. At our request Mr. Leo Reed has gone over what we have and has pulled together the unpublished material. This volume is meant to supply the content that was both planned by Busby and also beyond what he had begun to prepare.

Included in the material we received were 2 archaic 5.25″ floppy discs that had Busby’s drafts of volumes 9 and 10. Mr. Reed found the items Busby had planned for those volumes and included them here in scans of the original notes.

Additionally you will find other notes and materials that we believe Mr. Busby intended to use in later volumes. We have given it all to you here.

We have tried our best to do our due diligence over the last 2 years to ascertain who has the rights to this material. We believe that the material is either now public domain or that the rights holder has no objection to our releasing it.

At this time this book will be limited to the original buyers of the Fred Braue notebooks and those who have bought the 8 volume sets now offered.

It’s our hope that by releasing this material it will serve to mitigate the incompleteness the project was left in a few years ago as well as to further bolster Mr. Braue’s legacy and reputation.

If you were one of the original buyers of the Fred Braue Notebooks, please reach out to us at orders@conjuringarts.org regarding receiving a PDF of The Unpublished Fred Braue Notebooks. We have Mr. Busby’s original subscription records, so we can verify your subscription to the Notebooks.

8 1/2 x 11 inch format, spiral-bound.
Volume 1 – 35 pages
Volume 2 – 33 pages
Volume 3 – 33 pages
Volume 4 – 34 pages
Volume 5 – 33 pages
Volume 6 – 34 pages
Volume 7 – 37 pages
Volume 8 – 34 pages
Unpublished Fred Braue Notebooks (PDF) – 235 pages

Please note: While this item is new and unused, it has been sitting in storage for decades, so issues such as rusted staples or bowed pages may be present.From the “Fred Braue Notebooks Prospectus,” 1985:Fred Braue, co-author with Jean Hugard of the celebrated EXPERT CARD TECHNIQUE and ROYAL ROAD TO CARD MAGIC left a rich legacy of unpublished material when he died in 1962. A superb technician, he had the “real work” on the current developments in card and close-up magic. Yet, much of Braue’s work remained unpublished on his death. His session notebooks, and notebooks of his own effects and sleights are simply astounding: they contain literally hundreds of effects, completely written, that have never seen print.

THE FRED BRAUE NOTEBOOKS in original form consists of roughly 1000 pages of typewritten text spanning some 30 years of creative thinking and recording. The few top-rank magicians who have viewed the vast amount of still unpublished Braue material have been astounded by its depth and scope.
The greater bulk of the material in THE FRED BRAUE NOTEBOOKS concerns card magic that Braue invented. It includes sophisticated sleights, close-up card routines, and platform card work. There is a complete general work on card magic consisting of several hundred pages which Braue was writing at the time of his death called SLEIGHTS. There is a complete book devoted to new routines and original sleights with cards that did not have a working title. And, included in THE FRED BRAUE NOTEBOOKS is the suppressed material from two classics, material that was intended for, but for various reasons never saw print in EXPERT CARD TECHNIQUE and ROYAL ROAD TO CARD MAGIC. In short, there is a wide variety of original sleights, moves, effects, and routines with cards.

In addition, there is non-card material that will be of interest to any magician, including Braue’s routine for the Sympathetic Silks; other silk effects; visual gags; Linking Rings; coins; and a section on the Cups and Balls which includes a complete description of Braue’s Cups and Balls routine – an ingenious routine using five balls of which only three are seen. Also included is a comprehensive description of the ball vanish that Max Malini used in his Cups and Balls routine.

Included in the series of THE FRED BRAUE NOTEBOOKS will be the session notebooks that Braue kept – extensive notes on themagicians that he met and the material that was shown to him – a fascinating look at the “underground” of the time. Included in the series are effects and routines by the following legendary names: Charlie Miller, T. Nelson Downs, Dai Vernon, Max Malini, Paul Rosini, Dr. Elliott, Nate Leipzig, Paul LePaul, Bert Allerton, Jack McMillen, Tenkai, Emil Jarrow, and many others.

In the bulk of the cases, these are not just “notes”, but complete descriptions by a professional writer. It is a wealth of material that has previously not seen print now being released for the first time.