Card manipulation

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U.S. Marine performing a flourish with a deck of playing cards.

Card manipulation is the artful handling of cards without any magical purpose, whether it be the cards themselves, the box, the cards in the box, and so on (and is thus not to be confused with card magic).

Card manipulators performing card fans and other manipulations, which require the individual cards to flow smoothly across each other, use a powder, called Zinc stearate ( available from Chemical suppliers ) or Fanning powder (available from magic shops) to lubricate the surface of the cards.

Playing cards became popular with magicians in the last century or so as they were props which were inexpensive, versatile, and easily manipulated. Although magicians have created and presented myriad illusions with cards (referred to mainly as card tricks), these illusions are generally considered to be built upon perhaps a hundred or so basic principles and techniques. Presentation and context (including patter, the conjurer's misleading self-serving account of what he is doing) account for many of the variations.

Card magic, in one form or another, likely dates from the time playing cards became commonly known — towards the second half of the fourteenth century — but its history in this period is largely undocumented. One may surmise from the practice of how other everyday objects have been pressed into the service of conjurers across cultures and the ages that card magic developed spontaneously and roughly concurrently in different parts of the world, if not always synchronously. However, compared to sleight of hand magic in general and to cups and balls, it is a relatively new form of magic.