David Stone's Words - Book Test

David Stone’s Words

Forget the novel. Forget the dictionary. Your spectator is handed something completely different, something they recognise immediately, have probably filled in on a plane or a rainy afternoon, and would never in a million years expect to be the centrepiece of the most powerful book test they have ever experienced.

A word-search magazine.

Originally created in 2012 by Yoan Tanuji and Stéphane Guekko, and made famous worldwide by David Stone, WORDS is finally back in a brand new edition with fresh grids, fresh instruction, and everything working performers need to turn a completely innocent-looking prop into a multi-phase mind-reading experience that builds from one impossible moment to the next.

Here is how it plays: your spectator opens the magazine to any page, looks at the grid, and silently thinks of one of the words they see. Nothing is said out loud. They simply concentrate. You look at them for a few seconds. And you tell them exactly what they are thinking. Clean. Direct. Completely impossible.

But that is only the beginning. You can repeat the revelation with different pages, different grids, and different words, turning the effect into a complete mind-reading sequence rather than a single moment. Then you can reveal the exact letter immediately after their chosen word inside the grid, a layer of detail that takes the impossibility to a different level entirely.

And for the finale: your spectator selects one of the 100 different word-search grids from anywhere in the magazine. You pick up a pen and, at extraordinary speed, reproduce their entire grid on paper right in front of the audience. What began as a thought-of word revelation has transformed into an impossible demonstration of mental ability that leaves the room with nothing left to rationalise.

One prop. Multiple miracles. Entirely up to you how far you take it.

What’s included:

Two specially designed 100-page word-search magazines created exclusively for David Stone’s Words

A comprehensive in-depth video tutorial by Yoan Tanuji and Guillaume Bienné covering every routine, technique, subtlety, and performance detail

Available in English, French, German and Spanish.

Difficulty: Intermediate
Best for: Close-up, parlour, stage, corporate mentalism