One of Cavalli’s most treasured secrets!

Never revealed before!

X-RaysNotepad

And Other Devices ForThe Professional Mentalist

First Public Release – April 2007

© 2007 by Paolo Cavalli

Pictures of the X-Rays Gimmick

The transparent polyethylene sheet was placed three pages under the one with the drawing of the FLOWER (in other words, as if it were the 4th page in the notepad) and very little pressure was applied when drawing.

And yet, as you see in this picture, the transparent sheet has taken a great impression of the FLOWER drawing.

NOTE: The initial reason of why I took the picture of the “impressed” polyethylene thin sheet against a black background was because I wanted you to see how much VISIBLE the drawing is.

… But then, I thought that some of my readers could assume that they would need some black (or dark) background in order to be able see the impression, and thus I decided to take another picture of the transparent sheet against some natural background…

Here is my hand holding the transparent polyethylene sheet in the air, against a beautiful sunset, and the “X-RAYS” IMPRESSION of the FLOWER is very visible to the “eye” of my photo camera!

Pictures of the Poor Man’s Magic Slate Gimmick

Take some NEUTRAL lip-balm (once again my preference goes to the Labello® brand because I have found it to be one of the best chapsticks around for my various “impression-catching” uses) and separate open the two thin sheets of polyethylene. Then apply the lip-balm in straight, horizontal lines on the INSIDE of one of the two thin layers of polyethylene, with paintbrush motions. You must try to get a homogeneous as possible coating of lip-balm as your final result.

Having done that, you simply close the two thin sheets of polyethylene and, with the outer edge of one of your hands, you flatten out the whole area in order to make eventual micro-bumps and air bubbles disappear and to further spread the chapstick in an uniform way.

This Poor Man’s Magic Slate Gimmick was placed under the third sheet of paper (as if it were the 4th sheet in the notepad, just to be clear) and, again, very little pressure was applied.

And yet, the result is a perfect “magic slate” image. You can clearly see a PERFECT IMPRESSION of both, THE HOUSE and the number 874!

Pictures of the Tailor-Made Gimmick

IMPORTANT! :

This is the gimmick I warned you about at the start of your journey inside this book.

This one works BEST with BLANK PAGES notepads (without any pre-printed squares, stripes, etc.) because it will be easier for you to catch the WHITE ON WHITE impression left by the tailors’ carbon paper on a plain white page.

You cut a piece of the tailors’ white carbon paper to fit your needs and then you stick it on the face of the 4th page of the notepad (once again, it can be the 3rd or the 5th

page depending on the thickness or on the thinness of each page in the notepad you have chosen to use) and you are ready to perform!

As you see, a triangle, the number 391 and the color GREEN have been just written up and – believe it or not (but I know you believe it!) – you have now your White On White impression on the 4th page of your pad.

For someone this picture could be pointless… but not for me. I don’t want to resort to “trick photography” so I have inserted what the “eye” of my photo camera has seen…

And that is… NOTHING! But your eyes will catch the WHITE ON WHITE Impression – with ease or not – clearly depending on your good or bad eyesight.

Pictures of the Dual X-Tailor Gimmick

For this one, you simply use a double layer flap, as if you wanted to prepare the Poor Man’s Magic Slate Gimmick, but – No lipbalm needed, here!... You simply insert the Tailor-Made Gimmick between the two layers and you are set to go!

Gimmick is placed, as usual, under the 3rd page of the notepad and it will take some great impression… TWICE!

Well… Not that you will ever need a TWIN, simultaneous impression… but that’s what you will get anyway!...

One impression made by the white carbon-paper traces left on one of the inside layers of the transparent polyethylene flap, and the other impression (not visible in this picture because of a different light-angle) will be found on one of the outside layers of the same flap, exactly as the one you would get if you were using the X-Rays Gimmick alone.

Another picture of the white carbon-paper impression left on the polyethylene sheet taken against another natural background… A green meadow on a sunny day!

The Cover Dilemma

(Not for me!... I use it!)

Some people seem to shy away from having a sheet torn out from the notepad and put on its cover for the participant to write or to draw something. Not me, for sure!

Actually, even if for clarity of explanations and for sake of taking good photos of the various gimmicks I did not put any emphasis on my “cover predilection”… that’s actually the way I prefer to perform with notepads. As long as the covers are not too thick to get in the way of any impression, I will use them!

Just place one of the impression gimmick under the 3rd sheet of the pad (it will then actually be under the 2nd sheet - after you tear up the first sheet in order to put it on the cover of the pad) and you are, once again, ready to go!

A good test is to see if you can easily BEND the notepad cover (as in the above picture) and if you are able to, then this usually means that the cover is not thick enough to hinder any clear impression.

Another benefit I see from placing a torn out sheet on the cover is that this is almost another unspoken indication that you are not trying to get a sneak glance at one possible etched left-over on the next sheet of paper…

Yes, you could object that people think you can do that with the cover, but for some psychological reason, people are more prone to suspect you do that “sheet to sheet” than “sheet to cover”, especially if the cover has some multicolored artwork on it.

I cut out a DOUBLE LAYER from the transparent folder (using the natural folder seal, in order to have the two layers opening like a flap or like a V shape as a final result) when I need to prepare the Poor Man’s Magic Slate Gimmick or the Dual X-Tailor Gimmick.

I cut out a SINGLE layer of transparent polyethylene from the folder when I need to prepare the X-Rays Gimmick.

All of my various gimmicks work wonderfully inside envelopes but, depending on the thickness through which you need to get your impression, some of the gimmicks work better than others.

In the above picture, for example, you see the Poor Man’s Magic Slate Gimmick being inserted inside a Manila envelope. Let’s say you have a stack of those envelopes that you give to the participant as a support for him writing something on a business card and that the first (TOP) envelope is the one with the gimmick inside… Then, you will get a superb impression of anything your participant writes down on the business card.

Yes, the Poor Man’s Magic Slate Gimmick is THAT good!

It can get an impression thru a fairly thick business card placed on the envelope; and, best of all, if you use a business card, your participant could check forever for some “left-over” indentation on the manila envelope but he will not find any (not that you should allow time for him to check, but it’s nice to know you could) and, psychologically speaking, the thickness of the business card itself should discourage him from thinking that you are looking for some “left-over” trace on the envelope.

Even if my camera did not catch this impression perfectly, your eyes, hopefully, will!

In the above picture, you should be able to see a word (DOG) and two geometrical shapes underneath (a triangle inside a circle) …

This is the “business cards ONLY” impression-catching.

How?

First of all, let be clear right now that while this potentially work with all business cards, it works BETTER with glossy / smooth business cards because of the “non-absorbent” proprieties they have.

You simply get your trustworthy lip-balm (Who just said Labello®?) and you coat with straight, paintbrush motion the white back of one business card. Then you smear the whole coated area (to get rid of possible tiny bumps of lip balm) with one CLEAN finger and, as a last thing, you take another business card and you stick it to the prepared one (with its blank side against the coated blank side of the other) so that you have now what it seem just a regular – albeit thicker – business card.

Now, anything you write on another (a third) business card should leave some clear trace on the coated interior-side of the prepared business card.

Try and experiment with some appropriate thickness before going out to perform; and as with everything else (Yes, EVERYTHING ELSE) in our field and craft, you will always get into situations in which is better one method or set of techniques over the others… Therefore be ALWAYS ready to switch gears!

The red-yellow striped lines indicate the borders of an impression gimmick-insert placed inside the notepad and the two blue circles indicate the two spots of the impression gimmick-insert on which you must place some tiny dots of removable glue (or some tiny scraps of the so-called “magician’s wax).

Remember! … Only tiny bits of the substance must be applied, and NO MORE! You want the various gimmicked inserts to come out easily and without leaving trace, when you need them !!!

Also, to be thorough and complete in my revelations to you, I must tell you that I NEVER use any substance with ONE of the gimmicks: The X-Rays Gimmick.

The X-Rays Gimmick is cut out, as you probably recall, from a SINGLE layer of the polyethylene folder and never goes thru any modification of sort. And because of that and of its relative lightness, since the first times I was using it I found out that if you place it against one sheet of paper and then lightly flatten it out on that paper surface with the edge of your hands, for some kind of “static electricity” reason, it will cling to the sheet surface area. Also, you must keep in mind, there will be other notepad’

sheets over the gimmick (usually 3 or 4 sheets) thus adding a light “friction” to the polyethylene layer, preventing it to slide down, out of the notepad.

This “Tailor-Made” gimmick gets his title from the fact that it uses in an INVISIBLE way something that usually tailors use in a VISIBLE way... White Carbon Paper.

Luckily, you can find this kind of carbon paper in at least two different sizes (and the biggest size sheets of white carbon paper are bigger than an A4 Notepad) so that you can cut and trim it for your own specific needs.

You simply place a piece of this white carbon-paper on the 3rd or on the 4th page of a notepad (depending on the thickness of the notepad’s pages) and you are set to go!

On using borrowed notepads, on Pre-Show VS. Real-Time, and on getting your peek:

Let’s start with your notepads first. As you know by now, you can gimmick any notepad (and pretty any size) by just inserting one of my gimmicks into them.

Now, on how to get your peek.

Admittedly, three out of four of my methods work best with pre-show or with any situation in which there is some privacy for you to openly glance at the impression (it could even be a private party in which you go into another room to do something else, or your medium goes there and you send to her the “image” you get …).

The method that will work equally as well in real-time as in other situations is the Tailor-Made Gimmick. Because the impression is white on white is not easy to spot it if you are not looking for it and if you don’t know where it is.

We will first talk about the “move” you need using the other three methods, both for pocket size notepads and for A4 size ones…

For the pocket notepads, you simply start to pocket your notepad but – when is about half of its length inside your pocket – you seem to have a second thought and bring it back out – always with its cover closed! – only to immediately toss it away or to give it to someone to hold for the time being.

But it’s during the previous “half-pocketing” that you let your fingers inside the first sheets of the notepad and gently pull on the gimmicked-insert which will easily slide out and down into your pocket.

Then you will have many ways to look at the gimmick – I simply turn my back while I tell the person to put the folded drawing in one of her pockets or to place the folded

drawing inside an opaque envelope and seal the envelope, then pocket it… and in the meanwhile I can bring out other things from my pockets (including the gimmick that will be covered by some other object).

If working with A4 size, I simply go toward my briefcase with the CLOSED notepad in one of my hands, and without looking at it for a second, I simply place it into my briefcase (but my fingers also do the slide-out manoeuvre to get the gimmicked-insert slide out from the pad).

Of course, in this case, I cannot palm the gimmick-insert (because of its big size!) and I must find some reason to search something in my briefcase… Something that I will make part of the experiment.

Still, as I have written above, these three methods (X-Rays, Poor Man’s Magic Slate, Dual X-Tailor) were being devised by me to work as Pre-Show methods.

In those situations you could always switch the pad with the gimmicked insert for another one, as a second thought, after having pocketed it…

And then, at your leisure, you could openly take out the insert and read the impression.

Now, back to the Tailor-Made method…

If wanting to get the info in real-time, you still have to do the “half-pocketing” action, but here you are only sliding out the square of tailor’s white-carbon paper because it has now done its work.

The impression info will be left, white-on-white, on the page of the notepad. You will then openly tear out the now first page of the notepad (without looking at it and maybe mentioning you don’t want people to think you are looking for some “etched” impression on the next sheet) and even another page (depending on how deep in the notepad you put your white-carbon paper insert)… then you will be ready to use that same pad to duplicate the info because now, if you the white impression should be facing at you…

Two ways to go in order for you to reproduce the information… You can trace with a thick tip pen the white impression contour and then you are done and can show to people what you drew, OR you can make a “false start”, then tearing out and crumpling that sheet too (disposing in this way of the evidence) and start again on the next sheet, this time, drawing the right impression you got.

But, above all, I feel the real strength of my various gimmicked inserts is that you can gimmick any borrowed notepad, provided you have the inserts with you.

The ones I use the most are the X-Rays Gimmick (because it’s so easy to slide it into any pocket notepad I find laying around, when no one is watching! It just takes a few seconds!) and the Poor Man’s Magic Slate Gimmick (because it gets excellent impressions!)