Reflections
CC: It’s 2006, so it’s fifty years since Mathematics, Magic and Mystery appeared. I wondered if we could wind the clock back a little bit and if you can tell us how that book came about.
MG: When I was living in New York, I use to go to a gathering of mathematicians at Yeshiva University, and it was a gathering that was run by a fellow named Jekuthiel Ginsburg who edited Scripta Mathematica, a magazine devoted to history of mathematics. He found out that I was interested in mathematical magic and asked me to do a series of articles, for Scripta. So I did a series of pieces, one on card tricks and one on dice tricks and on miscellaneous objects and so on, and I put those together and that became a book. That is how it became about and Dover published it and I was paid a total of $500 for it. No royalties, but later it got translated into French and German and fortunately for me and unfortunately for Dover, they forgot to put into the clause anything about foreign sales. So I got all the royalties on foreign sales and made far more on the German edition then I did on the English one. That is how that came about.
Read the entire interview here.