I operate a non-commercial website at https://www.magicref.net/magicbooks/index.htm that lists the table of contents for over 6000 Magic Books. I just posted a March update. There are books listed from the 1800's all the way to current books. Note that I do not own all of these books - the lists are compiled from my library, from the contributions of others, from eBay listings, and from other areas of the Web. Also, there is nothing for sale here, this is just an information resource for magicians.

The site can be helpful to find out what's in a book before you buy it, or to research where a particular effect might be found.

A handy tip is to use Google's "site" search, such as, "site:magicref.net/magicbooks/ wallet" - to search this section of the site for articles that contain the word wallet. You can put the target of the search in quotes such as "card to wallet" to find more specific entries. All the books are listed in the main index page, so from there you can just do a "Control-F" and search the page for an author or title. Note that some authors are not always apparent; for example some authors write books for other magicians.

There are some other great sites out there as well that list book contents, such as:

Denis Behr's Conjuring Archive: https://www.conjuringarchive.com (highly detailed database!)
Magicbooks: http://www.magicbooks.be (need to register; lots and lots of book table of content listings)
Chris Wasshuber's Lybrary.com (a commercial website but they detail most of their magic books contents): https://www.lybrary.com

And Martin's Magic does a similar thing, but for books and tons of magic tricks: https://www.martinsmagic.com/

I know many of you already know about this resource, but I'm always coming across others who don't know if its existence, so wanted to share here.

Doug Atkinson

Doug, thanks for this info.

It's a great site. Adding content to the Archive is a much slower process due to categorizations and summaries, so I often check stuff with your lists.

Very useful site. I often refer to it and recommend it to others.

The Conjuring Archive is such a fantastic resource, and very impressive.

Denis, your ConjuringArchive.com site is more of what I had hoped to be able to do when I started out. I always thought it would be great to build this all with a database back-end, and then produce the contents listings from there. But, I'm very limited in my web programming skills and I started out on free web-hosting sites that had little support for such things, so I just took the easier road!

I like that your site includes the effect categories, that you provide specific card moves used in a routine, original author credits, and so forth. Very valuable information. I appreciate that you're able to use my site as a 2nd check; I've done the same with your site, and for an important book, your site has sometimes been the only place I could find the contents listing (and I do ensure to provide credit back to your site and magicbooks.be when I use the listings).

Even doing the double check can be challenging at times, as with some of the older, smaller book productions, I've come across books with the same title and cover, but slightly different contents. Probably the author updating the book for a different lecture tour or something, never thinking it would one day make it to an Internet list somewhere. Ha!

Thank you both Doug and Denis for the work you do! Been using both for along time.

I still remember when the Magicref website was on hosted on Tripod!

Thank you, great work! Jan

@Orlan - if I remember correctly, I first started the Magicref site on a free hosting service "Spree.com" or something like that. Then moved to Tripod which worked well for a while. I stated with the free service, and them moved to paid, but Lycos/Tripod really didn't keep up as network standards have grown, not even offering secure FTP. Now I'm using NameCheap which is relatively inexpensive and offers certificates, etc..

Thanks again for this great info!

Thanks for the plug Doug! Doug does an amazing job with Book Contents and allowed me to copy 100's of hits pages - which I always reference with a link back to Doug's site. I've marked all the books on my site with Contents pages here: https://www.martinsmagic.com/product-tag......ontents/ - it is nothing like the breadth of Doug's site, but that is because my main focus is props not books. But every now and then you'll find something that might not be on Doug's site - like the full content's of every Dr. Albo book ( https://www.martinsmagic.com/product-tag/dr-albo-books/ ) - but it wasn't until I saw Doug's site that I realized I had to up my game because it is so great to see the contents pages of all those books, without having to leave the site.

I also agree with Doug that Denis' www.ConjuringArchive.com is a totally amazing resource. What I like about these sites is they are clearly the product of many years of dedicated work by serious magic enthusiasts, and they all provide a different view into the magic we all love. I know I appreciate the work put in by these guys.

Cheers,

Andy

Great site and one I use regularly.

Thank you for the information and the work you put into that project !

This is an absolutely fantastic resource and incredibly useful. Thank you!