Posted inNonfiction

“Svengali of Sex!” — Detective World Magazine

Expose of Carnival Hypnotism Racket
September, 1948

When I awoke I found myself in bed in a trail­er, and some­one had tak­en my clothes. The door opened and Rein­hardt entered. 

Thus begins a lurid tale of the exploits of a car­ni­val sideshow hyp­no­tist as told by the woman he swept away from her life, among the many oth­er women he sim­i­lar­ly seduced and stole away and pressed into ser­vice at the car­ni­val, man­ning the booths, with no way or no desire to return. 

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Posted inNonfiction People

Joan Brandon

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Biog­ra­phy: Pat Collins was cer­tain­ly not the first female stage hyp­no­tist. There were many oth­ers, but most have been forgotten

In the decade before Pat Collins there was a female stage hyp­no­tist named Joan Bran­don. In her books, she describes her­self as a third-gen­er­a­tion hyp­no­tist, although it is prob­a­bly more pre­cise to say she was a three-gen­er­a­tion stage magi­cian who was also a stage hyp­no­tist. (Accord­ing to her books, her father was also a stage hyp­no­tist but he is nev­er iden­ti­fied, so that is dif­fi­cult to ver­i­fy.) About the only rea­son she is remem­bered now is that she is prob­a­bly the first to write and pub­lish a num­ber of books on hyp­no­sis (which are list­ed below.)

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Posted inMovies Nonfiction

“They Live” — An Update

Even though I men­tioned it in the orig­i­nal post­ing, I want­ed to add that the web­site Io9 has a new review of the book, “They Live” by Jonathan Lethem, here, a crit­i­cal exam­i­na­tion of the 1988 John Car­pen­ter movie of the same name that I wrote about here. I did­n’t exam­ine the book in that post­ing, but I’ve learned some things about it that I want to bring to my read­ers’ attention.

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Posted inNonfiction

“Fate Magazine” — ‘Special Hypnotism Issue’ — July, 1954

The ven­er­a­ble “Fate Mag­a­zine”, first pub­lished in 1948, has been in almost con­stant pub­li­ca­tion ever since. Self-described as “the world’s lead­ing mag­a­zine of the para­nor­mal” it com­bines non­fic­tion vary­ing from per­son­al anec­dotes on the para­nor­mal to stud­ies and research on the var­i­ous sub­jects under the col­lec­tive descrip­tion of “para­nor­mal” to fic­tion, let­ters, reg­u­lar columns and advertisements.

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