History Repeats

If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.- George Bernard Shaw

In October of 1960, editor and publisher, P. Howard Lyons wrote the following in his opening column of Ibidem.

I suppose you all saw the Canadian Parade in a recent Linking Ring. I once made a remark indicating that the re-inventors seem to inhabit The Linking Ring. John Braun wrote me a good letter wondering why I singled out The Linking Ring. I think the reason I do is that it is more evident that these “re-inventions” are conscious and done on purpose. The latest tragic example is in the Canadian Parade in 1960, in which one person contributes the notched propellor stick and the Robbins' “Magic Frame,” which by the way is much more ancient than Robbins. Ransom has a very old version, and a routine of his own—sometime I will describe the construction of his antique and his routine as well. But for the present, I think this material appearing in The Linking Ring and followed by the naive comments that do follow it, this constitutes a tragedy.

Of course, Ibidem is not innocent—Randi's “Clean Book Test” is apparently very much the same as a trick of Tanner's (in this case I had Randi's trick in my file for several years before the other had appeared), my “Ring-Off” turned out to be similar to one of Hummer's tricks, and now I find that it is almost identical with a move in Jack Miller's Linking Ring Book. Also, I had developed rather a complete analysis of reversible letters, horizontal and vertical, to be used in a Lewis Carroll issue—on reading some Hugard's Monthlies for the first time I find that Martin Gardner had this in his column several years ago. But I still think many IBMers do this on purpose, possibly because of the high percentage of non-magicians in the IBM.

The emphasis is all mine but I found myself dumbstruck as I read this. If Howard only knew how true these comments are today. The September 2011 Linking Ring has a column that features an effect that the author calls his own but it's really Gregory Wilson's Dishonest Abe.

I am not sure why the IBM bothers with a code of ethics. I guess it looks good on the website.