From a giant wall of oversize book dummies at the Workman booth at BEA….

…to real-life, actual page-flippin’, hold-in-your-hand books! It’s fall, which means that we’re starting to see the fruits of our summer labor parade their way from printing houses to warehouses to bookstores to READERS! (Yes, after all these years in the book business we still get giddy over the prospect.)

When Parents Text, Bananagrams On-the-Go!, the Book of All-Time Stupidest Top 10 Lists, and 10-Minute Crossword Puzzles have already made appearances in our offices, and The Best of the Rejection Collection, The Big Book of Visual Sudoku, Missed Connections, How to Feed a Hungry Giant, and even advance copies of Embroider Everything Workshop are due to land this month! It’s enough to make me start thinking about Christmas shopping…

How’d he do that?? Watch the video below (introduced by Randy Jackson–yes, that one, dawg) for a particularly spectacular performance by our resident author and magician Joshua Jay. NOTE: Before you hit play, please place your hands securely below your chin so you can safely catch your jaw when it drops off your face.

Joshua Jay is the author of Magic: The Complete Course, Joshua Jay’s Amazing Book of Cards, and the forthcoming The Complete Magician (a complete kit with book, DVD, and magic props!).

It’s Workman’s first Vook (video met book, they hit it off, and had a baby=Vook) and first ever app for the iPad for that matter, and we couldn’t be prouder of our little bundle of joy. Adapted from Joshua Jay’s book Magic: The Complete Course,  10 Greatest Card Tricks of All Time is a collection of ten performance-worthy, audience-tested tricks from an award-winning professional magician.

Download the app and begin with the foundation exercises. Then learn the show-stopping, date-impressing, Vegas-style effects through the Vook’s embedded video. Read along and tap to watch Jay perform and teach the tricks.

Check out author Joshua Jay demonstrating how it works:

1 app. 10 tricks. Our excitement level registering 11.

Click here to download it from the iTunes app store!

Learn a fun wager from the Amazing Book of Cards with this video from Joshua Jay–it could earn you a free drink, or at least a round of laughter!

Card tricks have the ability to endlessly entertain. They are the ultimate party icebreaker and can make you the superhero of any awkward social situation. Joshua Jay’s Amazing Book of Cards is packed with 52 amazing things to do with a deck of cards. Catch a glimpse of them in the video trailer below!

Before the holidays (yes, way back in December), a group of us (editor, photographer, photography director, lighting specialists, models, assistants, interns) gathered for three straight days for a photo shoot for Joshua Jay‘s followup book to Magic: The Complete Course–The Amazing Book of Cards. Tricks, shuffles, games, and hustles, plus the history of cards, how to build a card castle (or at least a card condo) and how to make a playing card wallet–even how to send a playing card through the mail.

Josh Jay’s books are easy to learn from in part because of the step-by-step photos that go along with each trick. But what’s not so easy is the process of making those step-by-step photos. Photographer David Arky was practically hanging from the rafters of the studio to get these overhead shots!

There’s our author and card sharp, Joshua Jay, who’s been carrying around a deck of cards regularly since he was 7 years old. Sleight-of-hand closeup card magic is his specialty, and in his new project, he’s game for showing us all a few flourishes that will let people at your weekly poker gathering know that you mean business. Here’s a fun fact from the photo shoot: Josh arrived on set wearing a blue T-shirt–the lighting specialist had him layer a white shirt over it to help reflect the light in the studio off the undersides of the cards. Pretty fancy.

And, lastly, here’s the view from above  as Josh demonstrates a very impressive  “ribbon spread and flip.” We shot on a royal blue plexi surface for the majority of the shots and then switched to blue velvet for the tricks (like the one shown here) that needed a textured surface to work properly–note the well-placed clamps to keep it taut over the table!

The book is slated to come out this spring, so get ready to impress at the poker table like you never have before. Cascade the cards from one hand to the other, show off a perfect casino riffle shuffle, throw in a few false cuts, and find four Aces without touching the deck — intimidating, no?

Written by charismatic young magician Joshua Jay, Magic combines expertise, photographs, step-by-step directions showing how to perform 100 tricks, and a DVD that demonstrates 35 of them.