Magic supplies in Lansing, Ingham County, Michigan

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.

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 Lansing 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 Lansing like anywhere else in the country. That covers all of Ingham County. Orders over $75 ship free to Lansing, as anywhere else.