A group of random audience members file on stage and each
place a personal possession inside a sturdy, commercial-
model safe, out of view of the magician, Charles Morritt. The
safe is locked before anyone looks inside, and after a beat, a
burglar appears. The lock-picking bandit looks at the closed
safe with a pair of field glasses and disappears. Moments
later, a telegram arrives for Morritt. It’s from the master
thief. It says, in essence, “I’ve decided not to crack that safe
and steal the contents—it’s not worth my time. But here’s a
list of everything inside.”
When the safe is opened, the list matches up, item for item.
By almost any estimation, Steinmeyer is the greatest
creator of illusions in the history of magic and theater, but
describing Morritt’s stagecraft still animates and energizes
him. He’s not even sure what to call the act. It’s a mind-
reading trick, but instead of the magician playing the part of
the clairvoyant, it’s the third-party burglar.
“Something bigger is happening,” Steinmeyer says. Mor-
ritt had come up with a new twist on a familiar routine: A
magician presses his fingers to his temples, closes his eyes,and sees the un-seeable.
Steinmeyer uses the
mind-reading trick as a
launchpad into a fascinating
disquisition on how magic
tricks evolve, but it walls me
off from a question I’m eager
to ask: How does it work?
That’s the point of my vis-
it—I’m here to understand
what Steinmeyer does and how he does it. I’d approached him
with this intent a few weeks earlier. He’d been polite, but wary.
Given the nature of his business, he said, he had to be propri-
etary about his insights. “In terms of explaining how things
work,” he told me, “I can’t get into too much of that.”
But he had agreed to let me inside his world under an ill-
defined agreement to stick to the basic principles of building
magic tricks. Of course, I’m still hoping he’ll lift the lid on his
more guarded secrets, and I’m alive to the fact that I’m in the
room containing much of his classified material.
My eyes f lick across Steinmeyer’s studio, a shrine to the
history and craft of stage magic. Here is a miniature ver-
sion of the cabinet used in the Disappearing Donkey illusion,
a once-lost trick that Steinmeyer reconstructed via dusty
tomes and informed intuition. There are two walls of ref-
erence materials: books about magic, of course, but also
books about furniture, graphic design, screenplays, and
antique apparatus. Resting along one wall is a pair of tables
used in the iconic sawing-the-assistant-in-half illusion, as
well as a locked chest for mind-reading tricks, a cylindricalTHERE IS A CENTURY-OLD MAGIC
TRICK THAT JIM STEINMEYER FINDS
PARTICULARLY FASCINATING.
38 November/December 2020