Find the Lady

The theme for NWBA this month was ‘Puzzle’ and the theme for PAS was ‘Inspired by...’

I was struggling with both but while I was watching a repeat of Jonathon Creek I saw him fiddling with a magic box and thought you could put a book in that and it grew.

The idea of the box seemed to fit well with close magic and card tricks. ‘Find the lady’, a card trick con, fitted with the idea of disappearing.

I thought this worked well with the idea of the turn of the century (19^th)travelling show sideshows  and circuses . I found copyright free images of clown from around this era and made cartes de visite with the clowns on them (very often photographers produced these cards with celebrities of the day as a money making exercise) to use instead of the number side of my playing card inserts. These are all men.

 It’s not enough to produce the book out of the magic box, to ‘Find the lady’ you have to dismantle the drawer to find her hiding underneath.