Okito’s The Thief of Baghdad

This is a beautifully made and decorated piece of apparatus. The magician shows a rectangle of glass with a hole in the middle. The glass is placed in the frame and some ribbon pushed through the frame from front to back. In the normal world this would mean that the ribbon has trapped the piece of glass in the frame. However, the magician is able to pull the glass up and out through the top of the frame, leaving the ribbon still passing through the front and the back of the frame. The high quality boxes in which this trick was supplied were purpose built for the job. They are shown in one of the illustrations here.