Credits

There is a tradition among historians, researchers, and some magicians and mentalists to credit their work, pointing out inspiration and prior publications that led to an effect released to the community. Others, however, have called crediting performative: something you do to show off your historical knowledge and shame other performers unable to do the same.

I strongly disagree.

Crediting has several purposes, but first and foremost, it is about avoiding appropriation.

Laws regarding publishing a magical routine are murky: you cannot republish a text that is still under copyright, but selling your own description of an existing routine and its method is perfectly fine as far as the law is concerned. Thus, the world of magic is mostly self-regulated: we get authorizations from creators and their heirs, wait for copyrights to expire, or publish considering that our contribution to the routine is large enough to consider the result an original work.

This is where appropriation matters. If I take a lesser-known great routine from the past and apply a minimal tweak with no credits, the reader does not know if I am a magical genius or just well-read; either way, I am stealing from that older author for fame and profit. Here crediting is a requirement, there is nothing subjective or performative about it.

Furthermore, my tweak might be a terrible idea, as they often are. Giving credits to the original routine gives my reader the possibility to look at the original and decide for themselves or find their own solutions to the problem that led to my tweak. This benefit also applies to the person doing the crediting: digging into the history of a routine often yields many interesting solutions to problems that you might not have considered (also, the original take is, surprisingly often, one of the very best versions out there, even if it is not necessarily the best known).

A common argument against crediting, coming mostly from people who could not refute the above points, is that crediting is too hard. One cannot be expected to be Max Maven and know all things magical! In the words of Max Maven:

“It is 2017, and you all have Internet access. There is simply no excuse for not putting in a minimal amount of effort. As was mentioned earlier in this thread, there is a website, conjuringcredits.com, that offers a wealth of information, and it is a free resource. The information there is not complete, but it is bountiful.”
– Max Maven, the Magic Cafe

To this, I would add conjuringarchive.com and askalexander.org (if you are willing to do a bit of manual work) as well as point out that you do not have to do all the crediting work by yourself. I am willing to bet that you know people with more expertise than you in the topic you are tackling, call upon them!

Crediting does not have to be perfect, we all make mistakes, and no one, not even historians of magic, knows everything. But the point is not to be perfect, it is to lay the first stones of a path to the sources you used. Plus, mistakes can be corrected (book errata are a thing, even in magic), especially when it comes to digital products.

It gets easier with practice: document all the things that inspired a particular routine, even those that might not seem obviously related from someone else’s perspective. You do not have to point to the very first occurrence of an idea, as long as you point to an occurrence (once again, it is about avoiding appropriation) and explain what you got from it (writing “Credits: Bob Cassidy’s Jazz Mentalism” or worse “Credits: the Encyclopedia of Card Magic” is not crediting but writing “The presentation is inspired by Annemann’s A Question and the Answer, using my own choreography to achieve the same effect,” would be perfectly fine). If you give honest credits then you are 80% of the way there (and if everyone does it then we can go up the historical tree and find the mythical first occurrence of an idea).

But what about independent creation? Your idea might be identical to something that already exists, but never crossed your path, and came up with it by yourself! Good for you, you can write that next to the credits. One thing that is abundantly clear to anyone who makes a habit of reading old magical books is that at least 90% of new ideas are actually old ideas reinvented (there is a lot of truth to the saying that “everything is in the Jinx / Tarbell”). Reinventing an existing routine does not give you ownership over it. Plus, one can only take you at your word on the fact that it is a genuine independent invention and, surprisingly, not all authors are honest. Your mind itself is not always honest: how many times did you think you had a great idea before realizing that it was simply something you read that bubbled up in your consciousness later?

Regarding honesty, I have seen performers use purposefully misleading credits to hide the fact that the work they are selling is a fairly direct rehash of an older idea. Pointing to routines that are barely related to the one they are publishing while omitting sources they have studied that are almost identical to their routine. Or pointing to virtually all the existing literature on a subject, with no further precision, and calling it a day. Those are instances of performative crediting and a topic for another time.

At the end of the day, a lot of crediting is indeed an exercise in showing off your love for the history of the art and giving your readers a gateway to it. Whether you credit or not is up to you and how passionate, perfectionist, lazy, or honest you are. What is not up to you, however, is that appropriating another performer’s idea is theft. Whether it is an honest accident or you not realizing that it is not okay does not matter. If your idea is not fully original, then it needs crediting. What counts as fully original? Hard to say but easy to solve:

Credit your work.