Walk the streets of Paris with us. These are the most inspiring magicians we have met in a long time.
Bébel performs nightly on the streets of Saint-Germain des Pres. Arthur Chavaudret studied and taught at CNAC, the circus school in Paris. Father Alex is a Catholic priest in Montmartre and one of the best at gambling sleight of hand, mucks and table work we have ever met. Manu Jo runs a chocolate factory and shares with us a kickback ace hold-out routine. Mael Adler is a young and brilliant card magician, shares a fooling triumph routine. Yoann Fontyn works with lasers and has an entirely unique aesthetic for card magic. Alice Pailhès shares work from her Doctorate on the psychology of magic performances. 272 pages of Paris.
Bébel
Arthur Chavaudret
Father Alex
Mael Adler
Manu Jo
Yoann Fontyn
Alice Pailhès
The contents of this issue, PARIS, have sat on various harddrives. SD cards and notebooks over the past twelve months. We visited Paris in April 2022, and somehow the time since then has just disappeared.
On leaving Paris, I can remember being surprised by how inspired — and reinvigorated — I was about magic.
The trip came at the end of an extended absence from the world of magic for me, which is odd to say since we only publish books on magic, but from time to time I do fall out of love with it as a hobby. The Paris trip though was a very welcome return to form. Everyone we met was truly terrific and utterly hospitable, and the daily pastries were as delicious as you could imagine. In the year since meeting the great French group, much has happened, but this project has never left our sights. This book has been forever on the horizon — almost ready, but neglected.
In the hopes of only making stuff that we want to see exist in the world, we're delighted to be able to bring you this fifth iteration of THE NEAT REVIEW. These books are the reason we are able to do what we love and only what we love as a job.
Here it is, an homage to the magic scene of Paris.
———EXCERPT FROM THE INTRODUCTION TO ISSUE FIVE
Details
Dr Alice Pailhès
Dr Alice Pailhès’ research has pioneered the scientific study of magicians’ mind control techniques — subtle ways to influence choices without people realising it. Her work has been published in top-tier journals such as PNAS, JEP: General, and Trends in Cognitive Sciences, and featured in TED, BBC, The Financial Times, and WIRED. Her upcoming book "The Psychology of Magic and The Art of Being Fooled" will be released through MIT Press in 2026. We spoke with her for our fifth issue of THE NEAT REVIEW.
Arthur Chavaudret
Arthur Chavaudret is a staggering presence. He is, I believe, the best close-up magician in the world. Born in 1989, Arthur discovered his passion at the age of nine: magic. After training in contemporary magic at the CNAC in Châlons-en-Champagne, he now explores both the creation and the definition of magic. What does magic depend on? What makes something seem magical? To broaden his horizons, Arthur collaborates with numerous artists. He has served as an outside eye for Yann Frisch on the productions BALTASS and LE PARADOXE DE GEORGES, and for Jean-Christophe Dollé on HANDBALL and JE VOLE. He was also a magic advisor for David Blaine on the TV show BEYOND MAGIC in Los Angeles in 2016, and in 2018, a magic consultant for the Comédie-Française on the production of FAUST by Valentine Losseau and Raphaël Navarro.
Bébel
Bébel is one of the best close-up card magicians in the world. We conducted our interview with him in Pigalle, Paris, where he shared his unique philosophies on street performing & sleight-of-hand.
Yoann Fontyn
Yoann Fontyn founded "Magical Sleight", a French collective of innovative card magicians known for unique, visual, and challenging sleight-of-hand, rising to popularity through their download releases from Yoann himself, along with Father Alex and Manu Jo.
Mael Adler
Mael Adler runs the Factorielle 52 magic bar in Paris, hosting magicians from all over Europe at weekly shows, and contributed an amazing triumph routine to Issue Five.
Father Alex
Father Alex has lived in Paris for 26 years. He is now about 50. Unless you’re quite familiar with the passion project of one Yoann Fontyn from the early 2010’s, “Magical Sleight,” or unless you’ve visited The Session Convention in England, or unless you pride yourself in taking a keen interest in the Parisian magic scene, it’s likely you won’t have heard before of Father Alex. Alex has been a priest for almost 20 years, and has loved magic since he was a child. He is interested chiefly in gambling sleight of hand, including methods of mucks, cops, palms, dice switches, traditional street games such as the three shell game, and the techniques that can be secretly employed in classic gambling games to rig play to the advantage of the mechanic. He is quick to point out to us, though, that his interest extends only to the point of curiosity; he would never actually gamble, let alone cheat.
Manu Jo
Manu runs a chocolate factory in the South of France. He's also a fantastic card magician. We met with him in Paris and he shared an interchange-based plot for table work.
Alexander Hansford
Alexander Hansford founded THE NEAT REVIEW in 2019, after printing a string of limited-run artist books to accompany talks he was giving to magicians worldwide. Across a 14-country lecture tour, from Vienna & Sydney to Beirut & Los Angeles, his books were met with a unique reverence by the magic community. Alexander's long-running collaboration with Derren Brown spans Derren's live theatre shows, including Olivier Award-winning “Underground,” “Secret” and “Showman,” to consulting on the card magic pieces for Derren's “Only Human,” which comes to London’s West-End in late-2026.
Kez Dearmer
Kez Dearmer is a painter, illustrator and 3D visualisation artist living and working in London. His writing, photography and illustrations feature heavily throughout the REVIEW and our books, and he co-created the DEARMERS playing cards with Alexander Hansford. Kez has been chief illustrator at THE NEAT REVIEW since its inception, and he is to thank for why any of the publications even exist.