Fresno magic club

Totally Out of Control is Chris Kenner’s influential collection of original close-up magic, combining highly visual card and coin routines with an irreverent writing style, cartoons, puzzles, and unconventional presentations. The book documents Kenner’s practical, inventive approach: effects are designed to be direct and memorable, even when accomplishing that clarity requires demanding technique.

The coin material includes transformations, vanishes, assemblies, and coins-across routines such as Hellbound, Three Fry, Aftershock, Long Gone Silver, The Deep, and O.O.S.P.C.A. The book is especially historically important for Ménage et Trois, Kenner’s fingertip coins-across routine that helped establish the modern “Three Fly” plot. 

Its card material ranges from Triumph, Travelers, Collectors, Twisting the Aces, Ambitious Card, poker demonstrations, and rising-card effects to Kenner’s famous Sybil false cut and The Five Faces of Sybil. Sybil became an important influence on the development of modern card flourishing and cardistry. The collection also includes linking rubber bands, a business-card printing effect, cigars, and a cut-and-restored rope routine. 

The newer Supreme MME Edition reproduces the entire original book and adds an approximately eighty-page section containing all four issues of Chris Kenner and Homer Liwag’s Magic Man Examiner. That expanded edition contains forty routines across 272 pages with more than 500 illustrations.