Hi Everyone,

Some time ago, I read in the Café a reference to a specific search title to use on Ebay when trying to find books, lecture notes etc. directly relevant to magic. I've tried all the most obvious phraseology in terms of searches but to no avail.

Can anyone help? As always, many thanks.

Lester

Lester,

Try searching the 'collectibles' area on Ebay. There is a magic book and lecture note section there.

Happy Hunting ............... Kevin

Kevin,
Be careful the Magic Café frowns on direct links to E-Bay, why I do not know but I have been reprimanded twice for a link to E-Bay..Maybe someone will read this and explain it, as I don't get it.
Rennie

The reasons the Café frowns on direct links to eBay are multiple. One is that ebay links die within 30 days or so. Another is that there is the very likely possibility of fraud.

You have to be very circumspect about how you handle references to eBay.

Bill,
What I never understood was, if someone is looking for a particular book or trick and someone saw it on E-Bay, what is wrong with telling that person "hey, It's on E-Bay and ending in 2 days". You know "Magicians Helping Magicians".
As for the item being fraudulent or a rip-off, that goes on everywhere, including the Café..
Rennie

Hi All,

Many thanks Rennie,Kevin and Bill for all your help and input.

As far as Lester's question goes. Does anyone know the different methods for searching. I'll give an example using David Copperfield since his search always picks up Dickens as well. Search Box --->

Copperfield -(charles,dickens,blaine,exposed,fields,character,characters)

I did not come up with that one, but it works (credit to Tony Ko), I would love to know the workings so I can narrow searchs or even find things that are listed differently and would not come up using the typical search.

Banester,
The search you showed works fine. Here's an example of one I use to eliminate garbage I'm not interested in seeing when I do a search for:

magician video -(briefcase, paintball, nokia, playstation, wiggles, download, "650 tricks", "magic rain", yu-gi, Maburaho, "Lord of Illusions", highlander, "The Sword in the Stone", pokemon, conan, jurassic, caligari, blaue, zelda, excalibur, "anthony hopkins", cleopatra, bubblehead, hunchback, coppelia, "7th voyage")

This search will find anything with magic, magician, video in the title or description but exclude anything between the ().

You'll notice the double quotes "" used - it's needed whenever more than one word description or phrase needs to be eliminated. How I get such a long elimination is because over time, whenever I see something showing up repeatedly that I want to get rid of I add it to the -(....) so it just keeps growing but my results keep shrinking to what I really want to see.

Do be careful of what you eliminate - you may eliminate more than you want -
example - if you just used sword instead of "The Sword in the Stone" you would eliminate any auctions with the word sword such as a video showing the sword thru neck illusion or anything else mentioning a sword. But sometimes no matter how careful you are you will still eliminate something you didn't want to.

Hope this helps....

Dave

Send the information to them in a private message. I don't think there would be a problem with that. I don't run the Café, that's up to Steve and his volunteers. I think that the fact that listings disappear fairly rapidly is one of the chief reasons that the eBay listings are prohibited.

It's not ours to question. After all, it's in the sign up rules.