Magic tricks with a pencil

About these tricks

A pencil is the best first prop in magic: every house has one, nobody suspects it, and it can bend, float, stick to your hand, vanish and read minds. The tricks here use an ordinary wooden pencil, sometimes a crayon or a sheet of paper too, and most of them work the first time you try.

Start with the rubbery pencil, which takes a minute, then the one that floats under your palm. The mind-reading ones use the pencil to write a prediction down, which is the oldest trick in the book: the answer was written before anybody chose. Keep the point away from faces, and hold it by the middle.

By level, 6 Apprentice (works the first try) and 5 Conjurer (a little practice). They come off 2 shelves of the shop, most from The Everyday Shelf (6) and The Mind Reader's Corner (5). What you need most often: a pencil (11), paper (6). None has a step only a grown-up can do, and none uses anything small enough to need the choking note. The quickest to learn is The Rubber Pencil (1 minute); the longest is The Instant Magic Square (20 minutes).