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As part of my Lubor Fiedler project, I built and tested some of his inventions exactly according to his instructions. This also led to some updates and further developments. In the magazine Magie, I have started to present some of these tricks. deutsch (Magie 7/25, page 442) Lubor Fiedler sends his regards!My manuscript “Lubor Fiedler's Wunderspiegel” was published in May 2024 as a supplement to the Austrian magic magazine Aladin (issue 1/24). I started working on it immediately after my three-part Fiedler project in Magie (7/21, 8+9/21, 10/21) had appeared, for which I was able to assemble a team of top-notch colleagues: Reinhard Müller, Michael Hitzel, Tony Reisner, Hanno Rhomberg, and Jens-Uwe Günzel contributed commendably as co-authors to this series of articles, which you can now also read in full length here on this website. Detlef Hartung, who at that time was just producing the last issues of the German-language edition of the Tarbell course, found the content interesting. As a bonus for his subscribers, he additionally published completely new issues on personalities in magic alongside the usual Tarbell lessons and suggested dedicating one of them to Lubor Fiedler. In the fall of 2021, I therefore began to come up with a concept for how one could fit a meaningful mix of biography, sleight of hand techniques, and magic theory onto just a few pages. Taking all available sources into account, after about 18 months I chose Lubor Fiedler's “Beautiful Mirror of My Life” (Genii 3/14) as the connecting motif, in order to combine key thoughts, exemplary tricks, and real-life events into a single kaleidoscope, so that the entire manuscript itself forms a Fiedlerian Beautiful Mirror. In the meantime, Werner Liebig had approached me; after the death of Lubor Fiedler's brother, he had taken over a suitcase containing the latter's final belongings and was now looking for a buyer: among them, in addition to written concepts for innovative magic boxes, magic books, trick props, and promotional items, there were four private notebooks with page-long descriptions and sketches in Lubor Fiedler's own hand. Werner Liebig kindly gave me permission to publish some pages from these notebooks in my Wunderspiegel manuscript, which significantly enhanced the entire project, as these Fiedler tricks had previously been completely unknown even to experts. However, it was eventually too late for a publication as part of the Tarbell series. I realized that there was only a relatively small market for such manuscripts and few opportunities to distribute them in print. Therefore, on this single occasion I did everything I could to get everything right, and that took time with a notoriously slow author. So the “Wunderspiegel” appeared in May 2024 as a magazine supplement, after I had completely revised both the content and the design several times, thrown out all the photos, even those I had received exclusively from Mark Setteducati, and instead incorporated some special features into the layout for which I was already known through my other manuscripts, e.g. “invisible” bonus texts, unnumbered inner cover pages, and precisely crafted running text that fills every page down to the last line. These stylistic “gimmicks” represent my attempt to find a formal correspondence for Lubor Fiedler beyond the content of the manuscript. Shortly after the Aladin subscribers received their “Wunderspiegel”, a wave of inquiries came from international Fiedler fans and collectors, which ultimately led me to publish the manuscript in English as well. I was especially pleased with the great success because it proves that Lubor Fiedler still has numerous admirers who cherish his memory. The English version was published in the summer of 2024 and was enthusiastically recommended in the American magazine Genii (1/25): “You are in for a marvelous treat in this booklet, … simultaneously light and an extremely quick read while being so dense with fascinating ideas and personal history, the likes of which make the man sound more fictional than not.” But of course, nothing needs to be fictionalised about Lubor Fiedler, because he has truly been incredibly fascinating for decades and a lasting inspiration for all who engage with his artistic legacy. We never want to stop recalling his achievements. So, I sincerely thank the magic friends Reinhard Müller, Michael Hitzel, Detlef Hartung, Michael Sondermeyer, Mark Setteducati, Dustin Stinnet, Jens-Uwe Günzel, Alfred Moser, Tony Reisner, Hanno Rhomberg, and Werner Liebig for their valuable support with my Lubor Fiedler project and the “Wunderspiegel”. To end on a whimsical note, I will share with you an anecdote from the world of today's magic merchandise trade, which shows that some of our German-language retailers, in all their globalization, are no longer equipped to handle German-language magic literature. Of course, every end customer can get “Lubor Fiedler's Wunderspiegel” from my sales page (www.zauberfranz.at/shop), and many magic shops also obtain the manuscript from me at book trade conditions. The English-language Wunderspiegel is called “Lubor Fiedler's Beautiful Mirror” and is sold internationally by both Penguin Magic and Murphy's Magic. Dealers participating in Murphy's Magic distribution system receive not only the merchandise but also the advertising texts, and if they are German-speaking merchants, an “intelligence” comes into play that automatically re-Germanizes the English product description. So instead of a Beautiful Mirror, the Wunderspiegel becomes a fictitious third product: “Lubor Fiedler's Schöner Spiegel”. And of course, German-speaking customers are not actually delivered a German manuscript, but the Beautiful Mirror. One of these merchants told me that although he sells surprisingly few of this version, he still wants to bravely keep the Beautiful Mirror on the program instead of the Wunderspiegel. Such loyalty moves me a little as well … |