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Glance

Thompson, Steve

Vanishing Inc.

(Based on 1 review)
You present the current issues of two popular magazines and allow a spectator to examine all of them and choose one. You turn away and instruct her to open her magazine to any page and think of any word. "But let's find a good word," you say, "Make it a difficult word." She thinks of any word, on any page. It could be buried in an ad or a word from a picture caption. It's all fair game. Once she has a word in her mind, she closes the magazine and you turn around. You look her in the eyes and tell her what word she is thinking of.

Glance is the ingenious creation of Ireland's Steve Thompson. In collaboration with Vanishing Inc. and designed by Andi Gladwin, Glance brings you an entirely prepared contemporary news magazine. Wrap it with any current magazine cover and you will have one of the most potent weapons available to the performing mentalist: an ordinary object that allows you to do extraordinary things.

With the blessing of Ted Karmilovich (creator of Mother of All Book Tests), Glance allows you to perform one of the most impossible, memorable feats of mentalism with an object everyone has heard of and read before. And with Steve's ingenious new system, you don't even need to fish for any information about the word before revealing it.
  • No glimpses.
  • No preparation.
  • No counting.
  • No short pages.
  • No stooges.
  • No peeks.
  • No sleight-of-hand.
  • No cues.
  • No guesses.
Glance is an achievement in both engineering and design. Take a cursory flip through the magazine page by page and you will be astounded by the craftsmanship of the wording and the precision of the layout.

"It's like the MILF of all book tests."
- Justin Willman

"To be blunt, the price tag is WAY too low for a secret this strong!"
- Ken Weber

"The best and most natural looking magazine test I have ever seen."
- John Archer

Reviews

I have both GLANCE and TrueTest . They are from the specs point of view very closely related but differ somewhat in methology. TrueTest received an extremely low star rating on this site, and contrary to what the creator has claimed on the internet, the points criticized have not been corrected so far. All the errors pointed out in the reviews are still there. Like previous reviewers I feel a buyer is entitled to a product that has been “assembled” with care. In this respect TruTest is very disappointing. But not all seem to feel that way.

About Glance there seems to be widespread agreement it is an excellent product in EVERY respect and available at a very fair price. It incorporates a short word feature which permits to perform it without fishing for the MOABT letter so you can, if you want to, perform Glance and TrueTest with the same audience and avoid using the same approach. I have not found anything like this short word feature in the dozen of book tests I have and I think it is great. Can you do (what I feel is the best feature in TrueTest) , e.g. tear a page to pieces and let the spec choose any piece he likes ? I tried it for test purposes using a photocopy of some pages. It did work, but doing it in a performance would be rather expensive while it is only 1$ in TrueTest. Also you will have more pieces without any text at all or no suitable words as the GLANCE magazines have large picture areas.
There has been a discussion whether one would want to exchange the cover of the GLANCE magazines with “genuine” ones. It can be done, but in my non-US experience is not necessary at all.
I feel props are getting rave reviews even though they have flaws that could easily have been avoided like the grammar etc. in TruTest. Jheff, helpful as always, wrote me a mail explaining his way of using the prop pointing out that in his routine grammar is no issue, and you may know he is an English language teacher besides being an accomplished performer of magic.! The more I follow threads the more I realize that we are a very inhomogeneous lot bound together just by our interest in magic. What matters to one is of no importance to someone else. Some of this is of course due to whether we perform for hundreds of people of for just two dozen or even less. What is of no importance in a street performance may be very important at an embassy reception. And not only that: audiences in different countries are indeed worlds apart. I have performed at places where I was beforehand advised a) to remove all court cards. (Some would feel embarrassed by the forbidden depiction of the human) and b) never to give or take back anything with my left hand. TrueTest only if you can live with the text defisciencies as described by earlier reviewers, GLANCE highly recommended without qualifications.

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