H. (Herman) Boaz

H. (Herman) Boaz is the name attached to The Juggler's Oracle; or, The Whole Art of Legerdemain Laid Open, a handbook of sleight-of-hand and conjuring that has kept his name in circulation through later reprints and digital editions. Project Gutenberg also lists him under "Boaz, H. (Herman)," which helps confirm the form of the name used in modern catalogs.

Some biographical details are uncertain, but reference sources on early magic history describe Herman Boaz as an 18th-century performer active from the 1760s and say he was long thought to be German, though later identified as an Englishman using the name James or Thomas Bowes. The same sources connect him with wide travels in England and Scotland and note that he was also associated with angling.

That angling side appears in The Angler's Progress, a poem celebrating the pleasures of fishing from childhood onward. Taken together, the books linked with Boaz suggest a lively, self-invented figure whose work sat at the crossroads of performance, popular instruction, and recreational writing.