John Booth

John Booth
Born	John William Nicholls Booth August 7, 1912 Meadville, Pennsylvania
Died	November 11, 2009 (age 97) Los Alamitos, California
Resting place	Lakeside Cemetery, Colon, Michigan
Categories	Books by John Booth

John Booth (1912 - 2009) was born John Nicholls Booth and became a successful nightclub magician before leaving magic in 1940 to pursue a career as a Unitarian minister.

Biography

A prolific author, he penned hundreds of articles on magic for Linking Ring, Sphinx, Genii and Magicol, as well as publishing Canada's magic magazine, Canadian Magician's Digest in 1929. In 1931, he organized Canada's first magic convention. In 1938 he also worked as "Jancini".

Booth eventually incorporated magic into his lectures and conducted the funeral service for Eugene Laurant. He was a world traveler and had climbed the Himalayas.

Booth was the author of the longest running column in Linking Ring Magazine of magic history called "Memoirs of a Magician's Ghost" which started in May 1963 and didn't conclude until January 2000 (435 monthly installments). The first 25 years of these writings were indexed by Ben Robinson and Amy Janiello and published as a book under the same title "Memoirs of a Magician's Ghost" (1988)

Awards

• 1937 Sphinx Award
• 1977 Academy of Magical Arts Literary Fellowship.
• 1983 SAM Hall of Fame.
• 1985 and 1988 H. Adrian Smith Literary Award
• 1987 Magic Circle "John Nevil Maskelyne Prize".
• 2000 Honorary Life Membership to the IBM

Books

• Super Magical Miracles (1930)
• Magical Mentalism (1931)
• Forging Ahead in Magic (1939)
• Marvels of Mystery (1941)
• The Quest for Preaching Power (1943)
• Fabulous Destinations (1950)
• The Story of the Second Church in Boston (1959)
• The John Booth Classics (1975) a reprint of the two previous books plus "A Conjurer's Reminiscences"
• Psychic Paradoxes (1984)
• Wonders of Magic (1986)
• Dramatic Magic (1988)
• Creative World of Conjuring (1990)
• Conjurian's Discoveries (1992)
• The Fine Art of Hocus Pocus (1996)
• Keys To Magic's Inner World (1999)
• Extending Magic Beyond Credibility (2001)

References

This page incorporated content from John Booth (magician), a page hosted on Wikipedia. Please consult the history of the original page to see a list of its authors. Therefor, this article is also available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License

• Who's Who in Magic, Sphinx, March 1931
• The Linking Ring, Vol. XV, No. 6, August 1935, Biography of John Booth, page 476
• The Linking Ring, Vol. 26, No. 11, January 1947, Biography of John Booth by Lawrence Arcuri, page 17
• Cover Genii 1965 August
• Genii, Vol. 45, No. 4, April 1981, Our Cover – John Nicholls Booth, by Bill Larsen, page 225
• Genii, Vol. 73, No. 1, January 2001, Obituary JOHN BOOTH August 7, 1912 - November 11, 2009 by Clay Shevlin, page 14
• http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/booth_1.html