Mental Magic

A barber in Chicago says he'd rather cut the hair of ten red-headed men than the hair of one brown-haired man. Can you guess why? Ask Professor Picanumba, a master of riddles who carries dozens of surefire tricks up his sleeve. He'll show you how to astonish your friends and family by predicting the answers to 88 word and number challenges. These tricks require only simple props — a deck of cards or a couple of pairs of dice, a calculator, and a pencil and paper. With or without an audience, these foolproof feats of mental magic offer hours of amusement. Solutions appear at the end, with 64 illustrations in between. Author Martin Gardner has written more than 70 books on subjects from science and math to poetry and religion. Well known for the mathematical games that appeared in Scientific American for decades and for his "Trick of the Month" column in Physics Teacher magazine, Gardner has had a lifelong passion for magic tricks and puzzles.