After The Dessert by Martin Gardner

You will find tricks with bills, cigarettes, coins, matches, silverware, napkins and salt shakers, all things which are readily available at any restaurant or dinner table.

This ebook was written for the performer, professional or amateur, who is seeking good, well-tested effects which do not require elaborate practice, preparation, or skill.

Martin has chosen only tricks which make use of objects found at any dinner table. All are performed while seated, with spectators on both right and left. A few of the effects are original, but most of them have been picked up from friends who picked them up from friends, so it was impossible to trace them to their origin.

Since After the Dessert was such a success, Martin wrote a second booklet with similar impromptu tricks for the table: Over the Coffee Cups.

BILLS
1. The Curious Fold
2. Naming the Date on a Borrowed Bill
3. Four Piles and a Dollar Bill

   CIGARETTES

4. The Unreversed Word
5. The Magic Inhale
6. Biting the Cigarette

   COINS

7. Coin Through the Plate
8. Vanishing Coin
9. Testing the Half Dollar

   MATCHES

10. Lighting a Match twice
11. Color Changing Heads
12. Folder Mathematics
13. Shooting the Match
14. Match Folder Wager
15. The Nazi Cross

    MISCELLANEOUS

16. Tapping Table Objects
17. Japanese Paper Bird
18. Vanishing Coffee Steam
19. Travelling Fountain Pen

    SILVERWARE

20. Table Knife Through Body
21. Breaking the Spoon
22. Bending the Spoon
23. Swallowing the Knife
24. Musical Knife
25. Spoon to Knife
26. Vanishing Spoon

    NAPKIN

27. Character Reading from the Teeth
28. Improvised Brassiere
29. The Invisible Hair

    SALT SHAKER

30. Vanishing Salt Shaker

1st edition 1941; 22 pages
word count: 6669 which is equivalent to 26 standard pages of text