Non, non, mon ami, we’re not talking “Hello, I’m the house magician” here. We’re talking world literature – great artists with consummate skills, both in commanding their subject-matter and in chiseling their gleaming semantic profile and persona from the gorgeous marble quarry we call language. Ah!
These are some of the best opening lines from magic books which I am aware of:
Jasper Maskelyne was drinking a glass of razor blades when the war began.
(David Fisher, The War Magician)It is late afternoon on the beach, and this would look like paradise but for the silhouette of a fat woman in baggy shorts.
(Peter Lamont, The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick)The history of female magic is short of names, achievements, and clothes.
(Irmgard Kleine-Nothdurfft, Box Jumpers and Bra Tricks: A Feminist Study of 20th Century Conjuring)I loathed myself again.
(Derren Brown, Confessions of a Conjurer)I’ve been talked into it.
(Harry Lorayne, Quantum Leaps)On my seventh birthday I ventured into serious billard ball magic, but soon I dropped it.
(The Brilliant Bernardo Braggadocio, Me, Myself & I in Magic, Vol. II)
ZZZAUBER 