From time to time, I talk here about favorite magicians and magic books, but I don’t really do magic reviews as such. But today I want to talk about—and highly recommend—not a book or a trick, but a magic-related product that I consider my best magic purchase of the year, maybe of the last two years.

It’s an app called Maven.  So, what is Maven?  Imagine the ghost of Max Maven returning as a sprite who like Puck could cast spells, span the globe and bring back the news—in this case, detailed information about your personal magic collection. Well, I’m not a believer in the hereafter, but I think having spent a month as a beta tester for the new program Maven, one could be forgiven for imagining such a thing.

Maven is not a trick or instruction manual, but is a browser-based catalog and database that easily and conveniently not only catalogs the location of your magic books, pdfs, ebooks, DVDs, lecture notes, magazines, videos and tricks, but can also answer detailed questions about your collection.

But as Stewart James might say—it goes much, much Further Than That.

Now I’ve toyed with the idea of a database for my magic before, but I’ve never seen anything quite so easy and powerful to deal with. I’ll admit that I am typically stymied at step one—inputting the information into the database seems like such a tedious chore that I don’t care how the program might benefit me.  But here is where the app’s magic starts to kick in, helping you to catalogue your items. First it handles the files already living on your computer—ebooks, videos and the like. You tell the program in which folders your magic media live—you can select multiple folders or throw everything into one folder if you like—and the app looks at all the files and makes informed guesses about what the title is, and who the author/creator is of each file. For those files it can’t identify, you have an opportunity to look at the file within the program in order to add in the title and author/creator info by hand.

Once you have the title and author information, you can now ask the program to search the web and retrieve all kinds of info about each item, including a cover image, description of the item, publisher, table of contents and tags that make the item even more searchable. You won’t get all this info for every item—it depends what’s out there on the web—but for recent items, at least, you’ll get a lot of hits. Anything the app can’t find, you can add in by hand. So now you’ve got all your computer files searchable and accessible within the program, no matter where they live on your computer. That is, you will be able to read your pdfs and view videos simply by scrolling through your catalogue.

But what about your precious books and DVDs sitting on shelves which have no computer files associated with them? How do you catalogue those? In some kind of electronic magic, you can take a picture with your phone of a shelf of books or DVDs, and the program looks at the photo, identifies the author and title of the items in your photo, and then like Puck scans the world (okay, the internet) and brings back all the info on the item, including again, cover, description of the item, publisher, table of contents, and tags. If you like you can add a location (say, Magic Book Shelf #3) to all the items at once, and all the items go into your program library. If the program cannot identify everything in the photo, again you have an opportunity to enter the basic title and author info by hand, and then send out Maven to add the cover, description, etc.

So now if you want to know the titles of all your Ed Marlo books and videos, or titles that mention Marlo, you can do a typical database search and come up with all your library items, and access them within the program if they live on your computer somewhere, or easily find them on your bookshelves with the location data that was previously entered..

Now, If Maven could just do a word search on titles, authors and tags it would be great.

But it goes Further Than That.

Using the Ask function of the program you can ask questions like “What effects would be suitable for outdoors?” or “Where can I find an impromptu invisible deck routine?” Maven then searches through all your library items and intelligently gives you possibilities, down to the very page number of a book, and sometimes even a search within an ebook file of the surrounding text. What’s great is that you can click on one of the items presented and immediately call it up on your computer from within the program if it exists there. I can’t emphasize enough how useful this is. For example, I wanted to learn a Torn and Restored Card effect. I knew I had an L&L DVD and also Lovick’s Reparation video. Those showed up in the list when I asked for T&R card effects. But the list also showed a video that I had totally forgotten about–Danny Garcia’s Torn video which I had on my computer–and I was able to preview it right away from within the list—and wow I was so glad I found it, because it was just what I was looking for.

What happens with Maven is that you get a whole new relationship to your magic collection, maybe more respectful, because you are not buying things all the time. Instead, you realize you already have it, and just didn’t know you had it! Another example: I asked about The Invisible Palm routine. Of course, I knew it was in the Jennings Book, but Maven also suggested other variations of it contained in magazines and books I already owned, all of which I could look at immediately from within the program for those items I had a computer file of, or easily find them on my bookshelves with the location data that I had previously entered. It was great to really see the full range of ideas on that plot, I just didn’t realize that I already had those other items. And I could save all that information too for future reference.

But it goes Further Than That…

Yes, there are more features of Maven, including a Notebook feature which allows you to group together the information you own concerning different effects into one routine, and save it as a set list. So for example you might have a close up card set with items from your library that you’ve chosen, and then an entirely different stage set. The info for each set can be saved individually, including your scripts for each routine.

You can also add your own fields to items so that you can add those to a search, making everything really flexible.

One last tip that I found really useful—I was finally able to get a handle on my magic junk drawer(s)! I laid out the items from each junk drawer and took a photo of them, and Maven identified some of them, and for those items it couldn’t identify, I was still able to add the item by hand to my library. Then I was able to batch add the locations (i.e. Junk drawer 1, Junk Drawer 2, etc). So now I know where to dig up that Ball and Vase when I finally need it 😊

If I sound enthusiastic about Maven, it’s because I am. The price of it is reasonable. For those who want portability, Maven can be remotely ported to your phone or another computer. When you buy Maven it automatically comes with 500 item tokens. That is, 500 web look ups, though searches do not use a token. If you have a large library, you can buy more web lookups for a reasonable price. As a beta tester for the program, theoretically, I could get a small compensation of extra tokens from the developer by providing a special link to readers. But I’m not going to do that, because I don’t want you to think I’m hyping this for the compensation. I’m just going to give the regular link and say, have a look for yourself and see if it fits your needs. Here it is:  https://askmaven.app/ I think you will really find this, as I did, incredibly useful and flexible. It’s something I use everyday.