About József Kovács

I first became interested in magic at the age of four when I saw a magician on TV for the very first time in my life. Shortly after that, my mum bought me a magic box, so I started to perform magic tricks in the kindergarten. 

The Hungarian magic literature is nearly nonexistent; there are only four or five books for children and only one of them was available in our small village library. Only two magic clubs existed, and both were in Budapest (the capital of Hungary), which was too far from where I was living. So, at that time children like me had no real opportunity to get involved in magic. As a result, I stopped doing magic when I was about thirteen or fourteen, and forgot about it for quite some time.
 
Ten years later, when I was living in Budapest, on my way to the university one day and completely by accident, I walked past the one and only Hungarian magic store... and my interest was revived. 
 
At first I started to buy videos, as it seemed much easier to learn from them, however, a few years later I became more interested in books. My reasoning for this was that I thought that, for the same money, I could get far more tricks if I bought a book instead of a video. It took immense effort for me to read the first books – because of my poor English knowledge at that time – but I soon realized that learning magic from books can be much more stimulating and inspiring than watching magic videos. 
 
Aldo Colombini, Peter Duffie, Stephen Tucker, Phil Goldstein, Karl Fulves and Jon Racherbaumer became my favourite authors. And, as I became more confident, I tried to reach out to some of the experts that I valued the most. I'm very grateful that I was able to share some of my tricks with my favourite magicians and get feedback from them.
 
Over the years... Wild Colombini Magic has marketed my Shouting Jokers, The Magicbox have marketed my Element routine, the ebook site Lybrary.com carries my ebooks and Peter Duffie published my Colour Scheme routine in his Mind Blasters II ebook.
 
For a few years I was living in Blackpool, and I am very grateful to the Blackpool Magicians’ Club for accepting me as an associate member. I really enjoyed the club meetings and I am very lucky that I met a lot of great people and magicians there. 
 
I am interested in close-up magic, but mainly in card magic. 
 
I am always planning to move back to my village. I am a member of both Hungarian clubs, but unfortunately I rarely have time to visit them.