Talk:The Circus Card Trick

Comparison with industry standards
I've proposed a policy on how to deal with magic descriptions here: Proposed policy for magic methods. This description is almost in agreement with the praxis used by publishers of magic technical litterature. What's lacking is that the creator of the effect (or in this case the routine) should be named directly beside the title of the effect, like this:

The Circus Card Trick by Clayton Rawson...etc.

And the date of publication should be added to the sources. After those two adjustments, it is in sync with the established format used by magic publishers, at least on a superficial level.

There's other objections though. I can not for my life believe that Clayton Rawson would be responsible for something this dry and boring. In my eyes, this must be a gross misrepresentation of a man who was famous for his weird sense of humour, his intriguing plots and his devious mind. Qualities both shown in his detective novels, but especially in his technical writings. Agreed that the source here was for amateurs, and effect is built on a Public Domain method (within the field we only use the term "public domain" when the originator is unknown), but it is still unlikely that Rawson would have put his name on something like this. It seems like the author of this article has stripped away everything that Mr. Rawson added to the basic premise, leaving just the original bare bones. And by that, he refutes the whole point of writing the article at all. Where is the point in describing an original piece by a famous creator, if you remove everything that made it original?

No respected publisher would touch a description like this, and Clayton Rawson himself would probably have been horrified by seeing his name in connection with this text.

As it stands, it's just a simple application to the "Key Card"-principle, and should be filed under "Key Card", and not under a separate title - unless the text is expanded with an account of what Rawson added to the effect --TStone 19:20, 21 January 2006 (UTC)