Economicon

EFFECT:

You invite two people from the audience to assist. The two
books, The Hidden Canvas and The Tenth Addition, are
presented to the spectators, and the first spectator is
asked to choose one of the two books. You hand the chosen
book to the first spectator and hand the other book to the
second spectator.

A third spectator is asked to think of a number between 1
and 100. Let’s say this third spectator’s name is “Tom”. You
say, “Tom is thinking of a number. That number represents a
page in your books. Please turn to that page.” Of course
they can’t, because they don’t know the number. The natural
and only solution is to have Tom announce his number. When
the number is revealed, the first two spectators are asked
to turn to that page in their books. Upon doing this, you
reveal to both of them what the first word is at the top of
the page in each of their books!

The included instructions contain additional routines and
variations.

Book Dimensions: Approximately 5" x 8" (13cm x 20cm)

MY COMMENTS:
Call this the poor man's version of Ted Karmilovich's
brilliant Mother of All Book Tests. Originally, this
product was made in 1996 and Merlins of Wakefield in England
has reproduced this set of books. As you might conclude
from the blurb above, once the page number is known, the
performer can deduce the word, however like MOABT it isn't
necessary. The major differences between this and MOABT are
that the selected word will always be the first word on the
page (even though they can have a choice of words and not
direct them to that word, like MOABT), the words are not
easily represented by drawings, and the slim books are only
127 pages long. One of the advantages to this product is
that it includes two books to work with. The words are
configured differently in each book, so if the participants
turn to the same page in each book the performer will reveal
two different words. The books are definitely examinable
and can be handled by the participants, though it's not a
good idea to leave the books in their hands for too long a
time.

Unfortunately, I can't go into much more detail than that
here. And, sadly, there is absolutely no mention of MOABT,
nor any credits in the 8 page instruction booklet that
accompanies the two books. It is very clear that Economicon
owes a lot to MOABT. If not, the new publishers should have
been aware of the classic and mentioned it somewhere in
their instructions. Despite this, I highly recommend you
get this while it's still available.