Magic supplies in Fairbanks, Fairbanks North Star Borough, Alaska

Material built to survive inspection from three feet away: sponge balls, cups and balls, chop cups, ring gimmicks and close-up mats. Street and table work is the most forgiving way to get good, because the audience is small enough to restart and honest enough to tell you when it did not land.

Trick decks do the heavy lifting while you learn: a Svengali deck forces a card without a single sleight, a marked deck tells you what they took, and a stripper deck lets you find it blind. Most working repertoires are still mostly cards, and most of them start here.

If you are starting, the honest advice is to buy three things and work them until they are invisible, rather than twenty and perform none of them. A Svengali deck, a set of sponge balls and a decent close-up mat will carry you further in six months than a drawer of apparatus.

There are three places to buy magic tricks in Fairbanks: a toy or party shop, a general marketplace, or a magic shop that sells nothing else. The first sells props that break, the second rarely says whether instructions are included, and the third is what this is. Nothing is listed here without saying what arrives and what it is for.

Hawaii and Alaska are the two states where ordering by post is not a convenience but the only option — there is no driving to a shop one state over. Performers tend to build one reliable set and tour it, because the audience pool is finite and word gets round.

We post to Fairbanks like anywhere else in the country. That covers all of Fairbanks North Star Borough. Fairbanks gets the same terms as everywhere else, with free shipping over $75.