INTRODUCTION

In the fall of 1994 I got a call from Janet Berliner asking me if I’d like to do a magic-related story for a David Copperfield anthology. His name would be on the cover but she’d be doing all the editing. I’d been kicking around an idea about a magic word—the right word. Whenever you used it to answer a question, the listener always heard the right answer, the best answer for you.

Powerful stuff. What a hook. Who wouldn’t want to know that word?

The story was the easy part. But the word…showing you some neologism you could pronounce would take you out of the story. But what if you couldn’t pronounce it? What if it appeared in the text as gibberish?

I instructed the typesetter to use a double overprint of DAVID / COPPE / RFIEL for the word. It worked. The result was COPPE. Pure gibberish.

David Copperfield’s Tales of the Impossible was released in the fall of 1995. We had a big signing at a Fifth Avenue Barnes and Noble, then a party at Manhattan’s Fashion Café. Janet and Matt and Ray Feist and other contributors were there, but we were relegated to the main-floor area while Copperfield and his supposed fiancée, Claudia Schiffer, kept to themselves on a raised, cordoned-off platform. We groundlings were allowed to look but not speak to or approach these ethereal beings. Freaking hilarious. I mean, what planet do these clowns hail from?

I love the story, though.