John Northern Hilliard

John Northern Hilliard (August 18, 1872 - March 14, 1935) was born in Palmyra, New York. He became dramatic critic with The Chicago Herald and later on the staff of The Rochester (N. Y.) Post Express. After moving to New York, he met Howard Thurston while a reporter on The New York World and became interested in magic. John was credited with securing the master magician with his first engagement on the stage. Several years later Thurston induced Hilliard to give up his newspaper work and become his personal representative.

With the urging of Floyd Thayer, John starting writing for the Magical Bulletin magazine.

In 1925, Hilliard became an advance man for The Thurston show. During this time he accumulated notes on what he was learning about magic.

In 1932, Carl Waring Jones urged him to turn his notes into a book, offering to publish it. But Hilliard suddenly died of a heart attack in 1935 while in a hotel room in Indianapolis.

His friends stepped in, turning his notes into the book that he had intended, one for magical profession only. Jean Hugard helped Carl Jones with editing and writing. Harlan Tarbell made the illustrations. In 1938, Hilliard's Greater Magic was published posthumously, followed by the publication of More Greater Magic.

Hundreds of the tricks Hilliard had collected though were still missing. There was a great hubbub about the missing material. It was not until the 1990s that a box full of old magic catalogs was sold at an auction and at the bottom of this box (not even listed in the contents) were two old notebooks-hundreds of typed pages in brown leatherette bindings. A facsimile edition reprint of these two missing notebooks were published by Genii Books as Lost Notebooks of John Northern Hilliard

Contributions

• The Great Poker Trick
• Experiment in Mind Reading
• Two Souls With But a Single Though
• Date Divination
• an Original Magazine Test
• a Think Stop Trick
• a Dictionary Trick
• a Two Person Code

Books

• The Art of Magic (1909) with T. Nelson Downs
• Greater Magic (1938)
• Card Magic: a Practical Treatise on Modern Card Conjuring (1944)