Magic supplies in Elgin, Kane County, Illinois

The quietest magic and often the strongest. Forcing dice, a dice box that reads what is shaken inside it, brass mental dice and PK rings let you know a thought, a number or a word without ever touching a deck. It plays to adults, it plays in corporate rooms, and it leaves no prop to blame.

Props that read from the back row: appearing and vanishing canes, flower productions, linking rings in 30cm chrome, silks, flash bags and the larger apparatus. Stage material asks more of your staging than your fingers — the method is usually simple and the presentation is the whole job.

Beginners usually buy too much. One self-working deck, one coin gimmick and one routine you can perform without thinking is worth more than a shelf of props you half know. The decks under $15 are not the cheap option — they are what most professionals learned on.

The short answer is by post, and that is not a sales pitch — there is no magic shop left in most American cities. The few that survive are in Las Vegas, Los Angeles and New York. What is left locally is the party-supply aisle and the fancy-dress rack, which sell plastic props to children and nothing you would perform twice. Ordering is simply how magic is bought now, in Elgin as everywhere else.

The midwest is the historic centre of American magic manufacturing — Abbott's in Colon, Michigan has been making apparatus since 1934, and the Get-Together still draws thousands of magicians every August.

We post to Elgin like anywhere else in the country. That covers all of Kane County. Free shipping over $75 anywhere in the United States, Elgin included.