Max's Birds of Prey Series

[Bob Plaut]

Any intel about whether Max's unpublished Birds of Prey tricks will ever see print?

[Richard Kaufman]

If it's not already been published in a book or described on a video, it's likely not going to come out.

[PickaCard]

That's a real shame. I have been fascinated with his Birds of Prey impossible location series since I saw them on the Video Mind VHS 20 years ago.

I had a chance to have a brief conversation with Max at the last Genii Convention. I told him how much I enjoyed the Birds of Prey and was looking forward to the next time that he would publish some and asked him if any were coming soon. That must have been a faux pas as his demeanor changed, and he answered: "no."

Part of me is hoping that Max may have planned some posthumous release like his good friend Eugene Burger did with his wonderful volumes From Beyond and Final Secrets.

[Richard Kaufman]

Max did not plan any posthumous releases. He worked on some final projects during the last year and a half of his life, but they were mostly short. The one thing that did reach completion was the chapter on Mentalism he wrote for the new edition of Greater Magic.
After his first brain surgery, he had extremely limited vision in his left eye, which made both reading and typing extremely difficult.

[erdnasephile]

I remember reading years ago in "Thunday" about the rest of the flock: "the Vulture", "the Falcon", "the Vicious Hummingbird", (and I think he added later, "the Mockingbird" and "the Giant Canary"). I'm curious, besides "the Mockingbird" has anyone here ever seen any of these in performance?
Second peripheral question: Max was famous for writing final drafts of tricks on the first try (I found this amazing). Did he keep detailed notebooks or did he just have everything somehow memorized?

[Brad Henderson]

I asked about this over lunch many years ago. I don’t recall the exact answer, but basically he said that some had been shared in the video series. He didn’t intend to release anything further on those.

[erdnasephile]

Thanks, Brad---Max shared so much with all of us--I guess I'm glad he kept some stuff just for himself.

[Edward Pungot]

@RK: Will Greater Magic also include Maven’s work on the Gilbreath Principle?

[Richard Kaufman]

Yes

[Brad Henderson]

Thanks, Brad---Max shared so much with all of us--I guess I'm glad he kept some stuff just for himself.

I really don’t want to make the presumptuous step of trying to interpret my memory in order to decipher max’s ultimate meaning, but I don’t think he meant to suggest he was keeping these things himself. Quite the contrary, he seemed to suggest that the strongest of the ideas were released, and that the basic premises behind the other ideas had already been published elsewhere. So it wasn’t about being protective, rather it was more of a feeling of dismissiveness towards the need to put out further information, then what may already be in print.

[Richard Kaufman]

I had the opposite impression: that Max was saving the best of the Bird of Prey series for himself to use in the future in order to continue fooling magicians with them.

[Q. Kumber]

I can see that threads about Max' unpublished works will end up as long as the Erdnase thread.
I think that would please him.

[PickaCard]

I wonder if Max's unreleased gems were passed on. Maybe he left them to the cognescenti, such as with his friend Michael Weber never to be shared with the regular magi.

Or maybe he asked someone to share a few with the magic community one day, somehow. Eugene Burger handed over that task to Lawrence Hass. Maybe Lawrence will surprise us again, one Halloween. But I guess from what Richard said above that is unlikely. I wonder if Max just did not agree with Eugene's approach to let it all out in the end.

[Richard Kaufman]

Max definitely wanted to take secrets with him.