I have recently gotten a number of requests for Ted Lesley's material or for refills for some of his effects. In order to clear up a few things about this let me state here:

1) Ted's company was wonderworkshop.com, not magiceffex.com or any other URL.
2) Theo Böhm acquired the rights to all of Ted's material.
3) I do not have any Ted Lesley material for sale.
4) I do not know anywhere else to get his material.

Contact to Theo Böhm's Magic Factory Shop
http://www.magic-factory-shop.de/index.php?language=en

Bill, it is not true that Theo Boehm owns all rights to the tricks by Ted Lesley!

Who are you? You post with a fictitious name, and you don't identify yourself. So your statement has absolutely no validity. Until you come forward and reveal how you have "inside" information as to who owns the rights to what material of Ted Lesley, I suggest you keep your comments to yourself.

I worked very closely with Ted Lesley during the last years of his life.

Theo Böhm recently posted and advertised that he was claiming all of these rights, as he purchased them from Ted and his relatives.

If you have any legal proof that Theo did not purchase any particular pieces of the material, I would suggest that you publish it here.

Ted awarded me the US rights to certain items, but failed to put this in writing, so Theo controls all of the material I supposedly have the rights to.

That's why I started this thread in the first place.

Bill who maintained rights to the Ted Lesley Marked Deck System as far as you know? I pointed Ted twords a few people years ago, and they came to some agreements and compensation for making them after the fact. I see they are being made by someone else now as well.

That's a complex issue. It depends on what the current owners of the system claim the system actually is. Theo Boehm believes he owns it, and is prepared to defend it in court. Martin Breese claims ownership of it in England and the U.S., and has documents to back that up.

However, there are similar systems that existed before Ted produced the Working Performer's Marked Deck. The Al Baker Readers are one example. They were in print in 1951, and use a similar, but somewhat more elegant concept.

My feeling about these different systems is that if someone is using a type of lettering that is not integral to the design of the cards, such as the Leslie system, that is an encroachment on Ted's system. OTOH, if the lettering is part of the design, then it's a development from the Al Baker system.

If you have Pet Secrets the Al Baker system is on pages 54 -56. If you have The Secret Ways of Al Baker, it's on pages 404 and 405. Jack Chanin also used a similar system.

I should mention here that I have not seen Chanin's exact system. I learned about it when I showed my first Lesley deck to a friend of mine who had been one of Chanin's pupils. He spotted the marks right off the bat.

Some think that Ted was the first to use the X for the number 10 in his system. Aside from the fact that it dates back to the Romans, Al Baker also used this idea.