A while back, we talked about insuring your magic book collection. I promised to tell you about the most important part of insuring your books: cataloguing your entire collection. I’ve been putting off talking about this because it’s perhaps the most boring subject of all time. But, a couple of people have asked about it, so I thought I should follow through with my promise and share my experiences. I guarantee that my next post will be a lot more interesting to make up for this boring one.

Cataloguing your collection is a long task, but will really be worth it should your books get damaged. The first thing I should tell you is that I think you should be as detailed as possible. This is because if you ever need to make a claim, your insurers will need as much information as possible to ensure that you get an amount paid back that is representative of the cost of your collection.

My girlfriend and I set aside a weekend to catalogue my collection. I admit, it wasn’t the best time I’ve showed her and she really did need some convincing to help me out, but she understands the value of the books (both sentimentally and financially) so was eventually happy to help. Here’s what we recorded for each book:

Title
Author
Publisher
Year
Edition
ISBN number (if present)
Amount paid (if known)
Approximate value
Additional notes (such as condition)

That seems like a lot to record – and believe me, it did take a long time to do, but it is vitally important. You could possibly leave out some of those items, but I’d rather play it safe and provide as much detail as possible.

There are also some important things that you should consider:

I store my catalogue, with photographs of each book, in a friend’s fireproof safe to ensure that if my house were to ever be damaged, I wouldn’t lose my books and my catalogue.

We didn’t finish cataloguing my collection in the time that we set aside and stupidly didn’t come back to it for a few weeks after. By that time, we had forgotten which books we had catalogued (and I’d messed up the order that we used), so it ended up taking a lot longer than it should have because of this!

If you’re like me, you probably add to your collection all the time. Try to make a habit of adding the book to your catalogue as soon as it arrives. That way you can be sure that the catalogue is up to date and that no books are forgotten.

Don’t just make up the value of your books – do some research! If you ever need to make an insurance claim, the auditor will be working for the insurance company so will need some convincing that your figures are accurate!

I’ll leave it at that. Since I’m pretty new to this business myself, you may have some advice for me. If you do, please post it as a comment below! Next time, we’ll look at something more exciting like magicians and facial hair.

During my recent posts on magic books, my friend Richard Morrell asked about insuring your book collection. While I hope that you’ll never need to claim on your insurance, if you own a lot of magic books I would urge you to insure them … especially as it could be free with your building contents insurance.

While I hate to say it, before I continue I need to explain that I have no experience in the insurance world and can only tell you about the process I took in insuring my collection. Your experience may be different and what I say may not be necessarily correct. So, in short - please don’t sue me if things go wrong with your insurance!

With that out of the way, the insurance process starts with the long and laborious task of cataloguing your collection. There’s a lot to be said about that, so I’ll post a detailed article in a few days. For now, I’ll continue with the assumption that you have a detailed list of all your books.

Next, add up your estimated value of the books and contact your building insurer. If you don’t have one, I’d suggest considering getting one as it could be just as cheap as insuring your collection with an independent collection insurer. Most homeowner / letting insurers that I looked at seemed to allow you to register a collection of any sort onto your policy.

When I contacted my insurer, they asked for a basic summary of the type of books that I was storing. Not wanting to go into too much detail, I explained that they were textbooks for magicians and that seemed to be enough of a description for them. They told me that my house insurance allowed me to register a collection up to a maximum value of £10,000 without any additional charge to my policy. While my catalogue showed that my collection was worth a little more than that, I decided that for now, this would be an appropriate amount.

I could have insured my collection for more than that and in that scenario they would have charged me a set amount, per thousand pound. It actually wasn’t that much more expensive, so I will definitely add to my policy as my collection expands.

There’s one more problem that I haven’t yet considered: proving the value of my collection. An insurance expert that I talked to (you can call her Tyler Wilson’s girlfriend … and sister) told me that if I made a claim I would be expected to prove that the books were really worth the amount that I specified. Apparently, many industries have independent auditors that you can pay to approve your catalogue, but the magic world seems to be lacking that.

Other than that one piece of unfinished business, the process ended at that. It took just a few minutes (except for cataloguing the collection!) and really added to my peace of mind. It’s incredibly easy so I would suggest that you look into insuring your own magic books!

This is the last in my three part series on bulking up your library. If you haven’t already checked out parts one and two, it might be worth you doing that before taking a look at my last few ideas:

Take the e out of ebooks
If you’re one of those frantic give-me-the-latest-trick-and-give-it-now ebook buyers then hunt through your hard drive and print out your ebooks and bind them at a local stationers. I have a few files of printed ebooks that I would have never looked at again if I didn’t have them printed out. Now I can quickly grab them and read them en-route or en-the toilet.

Lately I’ve been sending those magic magazines on a CD (Pabular, Jinx etc) to printers and having them bound up professionally. They look great and while most of them take up more space than twenty copies of Stewart James’ back catalogue, I certainly find them easier to read in book form.

Contribute
This one isn’t for everyone, but some might find it useful. Many collaborative book and magazine publishers give away free copies to their contributors as remuneration (very few actually pay). So, if your magic is original you can swap them for allowing your tricks to be published.

Deals are good
I often run deals on my website where you buy one thing and get another free. In fact, I’m running two such deals right now (for a short time only). Buy Dominatricks and get Movers & Shakers for free, or buy The Session DVD and get Magic from The Session 2 for free. Of course, I’m not the only publisher doing deals, so hunt ‘em down and double your library for no extra money!

Purchase at the right time
I’m constantly analysing the magic book market and can often spot when a book will receive lots of interest and quickly become out of print. If you do this too, you can often pick up books before their prices become overly inflated and their contents become much sought after. In fact, if you’re really good at this kind of thing, you could buy two of the soon to be sought after books and sell your spare later down the line and use the money to buy more magic books! But, since that was my suggestion, you have to send me a 25% cut of your profits. Thanks.

The internet is the world’s biggest magic library
While there are very few online magic content producers, a few of them are worthy of your attention. Many people seem to dismiss the information that they find on the internet, but sites like your very own Clog, Online Visions, All Magic and so on frequently have some great essays and tricks.

That’s if for this short series of magic library articles, but I have plenty more information to share that I know you’ll want to read about. For example, I’ll shortly be starting another series on insuring your magic book collection.

A few days ago I shared some ideas on how to increase the size of your magic book library on a budget. Now I’m back with a few more for you:

Shopping around saves you a pound … or two
If you can save a couple of pound, dollars or doughnuts every time you buy a magic book, just think how many extra books you’ll be able buy long-term. I try to buy new magic books from the publishers so that I can get the best bargain – you might like to consider doing the same.

New and old are both the same inside
My primary reason for having a large magic library is that I’m truly interested in the information provided by the author. With this in mind, I really don’t care where each book comes from (so long as it’s legal!). I’d say that at least half of my collection is second hand, which means I often purchase magic books at roughly half the retail price! I mostly buy older books second hand; many of which aren’t available in magic shops now.

Never sell a book
Tyler and I have discussed this on several occasions; we would never sell any of the books in our library. Even if I really don’t like a book (and that very rarely happens; there’s always something of interest even in the bad books), there’s a chance that my styles might eventually change or that I’d like to research something from that book. Of course, I hope that not everyone heeds this advice, else my second point in this post wouldn’t be useful any more!

I have a few more ideas to share, so will post them next time. Also, my friend Richard Morrell asked me about insurance for a magic book collection. I’ll also try to detail my research into that in a future post too.

A little while ago, Cody Fisher from Pennsylvania ordered some magic books from my website. The next day, I got another order from Cody … but this time the order came from Texas! After a little confusion, I eventually realised that there was one than one Cody Fisher in magic; luckily before I sent both orders to the same place.

Pennsylvania Cody (the younger of the two) has kept in contact since he purchased the books and said that he’s particularly enjoying performing “Synapse” and “Red/Black to the Future” from Sometimes it’s Hard to be a Cardman. He recently asked me how he could increase the size of his magic book library on a budget. Since Cody knows I love to collect magic books, he came to the right person for ideas!

Here are the first few ideas for you:

Size isn’t always relative to price
If it’s quantity of information you’re after as opposed to quality, consider that one larger book is normally cheaper than two or three smaller books combined. In fact, there are lots of larger books available for not much more than the average price mid-size books.

And that works the other way to: sometimes cheaper is better
It’s almost a contradiction to the first point, but sometimes you’ll stumble across a decent sized magic book for next to nothing. Marlo’s Cardician is the perfect example; it costs around ten dollars and contains some great magic.

Second-hand magazines are full of cheap information
The magic magazines that I own take up almost as much space as my magic book collection. However, the amount of money that I spent on the magazines is probably a tenth of the amount I spent on the books in my collection. I often pick up magazines for next to nothing at magic sales, making them considerably cheaper than books. Certainly, the magic in them is sometimes not as good as that found in books, but if you look closely you’ll find some excellent magic that nobody knows about.

That’s all for now, but I have plenty more ideas to share. Look out for those in a day or two. If you have any of your own to share, please post them as a comment on this post!