Ask Alexander

Sometimes there are services and products that you didn’t think you needed but once you tried you now can’t live without. This happened with me for Twitter. Now I don’t know what I would do without Twitter but before I used Twitter I never really thought much about it. Well askalexander.org is like that for me now. Those of us who registered with the Essential Magic Conference all received a free month preview of Ask Alexander. Can I saw wow! Ask Alexander is run by the Conjuring Arts Research Center whose Executive Director is Bill Kalush. What is the Conjuring Arts Research Center you may ask well here is a quote from their site:

“The Conjuring Arts Research Center is a not-for-profit organization dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of magic and its allied arts, which include psychic phenomenon, hypnosis, deceptive gambling, mentalism, ventriloquism, juggling, and sleight of hand techniques.”

Ask Alexander one of the services that they run is a search database of magic books, magazines, and newsletters. I can say it is fantastic. After my preview month I will continue with the service. You can save publications in the database in a personal bookshelf as well when you research on a topic you can keep them in collections and download them as one PDF or have it emailed to you. Very useful. It even works well on my iPhone. If you are a magic creator, lecturer, magic consultant, magic historian, or just love magic you should have a look. It is not free and there is a yearly membership price and a few levels of membership depending on what your needs are. You can see those listed here. It is well worth it, and like I mentioned I will be continue with a membership after my preview.

In the picture you can see one of the searches I did. You can see my vanity as I searched myself . It turned out to be cool because I found a bunch of Ring Reports I did for the Victoria Magic Circle in the Linking Ring in the late 1990′s that I forgot about and and other places where I was mentioned and this brought back a lot of memories I had forgotten about.

I want to thank Bill Kalush and the staff of the Conjuring Arts Research Center for giving us at the EMC the free month preview.

Aaron