This is the transcript of episode 118 of the Magic Detective Podcast, Dr. Eric Colleary & Houdini's Library. Listen to the full episode here. The transcript was generated automatically, so expect a few spelling slips.
This is episode 118 of The Magic Detective Podcast. On this episode you'll hear about the new book and exhibit called Houdini's Library. That and more on this episode of The Magic Detective Podcast. Hello and welcome to The Magic Detective Podcast, your podcast home for magic history. I'm your host Dean Carnegie. I am The Magic Detective and this is episode 118. Thank you to everyone who has reached out in regards to the format change. Please keep in mind this is only temporary, at least I think it's only temporary.
I don't want The Magic Detective Podcast to become an interview show like every other podcast out there, but I don't mind doing an occasional interview. In fact that was always the plan from day one to do a combination of interviews and my long form episodes. I just never really implemented that. The response from episode 117, the Charles Green interview, was absolutely overwhelming and if you have not heard it yet please go back and listen and check it out. Very, very informative. Also a little off-topic someone DM'd me recently and asked about my paintings, my artwork and yes they're gonna be coming back.
Back a couple months ago I was having some troubles with my Spotify account trying to get it all synced up and everything and I just decided at one point it was gonna be easier for me just to pull it, you know, rather than kind of put band-aids on it all the time. So it will be coming back here hopefully soon and I will be offering prints of my artwork once again. There's a new Houdini painting I'm working on right now and I may have another one before we get into October.
So anyway you'll see them all in good time. If you thought episode 117 was good wait until you hear what's in store today. I have Dr. Eric Colleary from the Harry Ransom Center here to talk about his new book and exhibit. This interview was very eye-opening and I must say I myself I learned a lot and you will too and with that let's not waste any time let's get into today's feature.
Interview with Dr. Eric Colleary, Harry Ransom Center
Dean Carnegie: Today on the Magic Detective podcast we have the Klein Curator of the Performing Arts at the Harry Ransom Center, part of the University of Texas at Austin, Dr. Eric Colleary. He's here today to tell us about a new exhibit at the college called Houdini's Library and also about his book of the same name. Eric welcome to the Magic Detective podcast.
Eric Colleary: Thank you so much for having me.
Dean Carnegie: Alright so we're gonna get we're gonna jump right into this. So during his lifetime Houdini was a massive collector. He was kind of bordering on being a hoarder quite frankly. He collected books of various subjects, he collected signatures of famous people. It was said that he even owned a desk that belonged to Edgar Allan Poe. Now I know many of his scrapbooks ended up in the Smithsonian in Washington but not all of them. There are books and letters and ephemera that ended up in lots of collections because when Houdini died all the magicians jumped on Bess Houdini and said what can I have?
So can you clarify for my listeners exactly what is in your collection?
Eric Colleary: Yeah it's a great question and it's it's really one of the the reasons that I did this book in this exhibit because there have been so many questions over time. Really I mean Houdini you mentioned it was sort of borderline hoarding and you're absolutely right it was a huge collection and it's something that he talked about in almost and every interview that he ever gave he worked it into almost all of his letters even when it had nothing to do with his collecting. He was deeply proud of it but when he died you know interestingly the story about his death those obituaries and the stories about his death lasted about two weeks but the stories about his library lasted the next two years but then the mythology sort of around Houdini came up and the focus shifted away from the collecting and the story of Houdini as a collector back on to the man and
the escape artist and a lot of those stories around his library really fell away. So when he died in his will in 1926 the will left the magic library and the spiritualism library to the Library of Congress and the dramatic library which was the third big part of it was left to his wife Bess to deal with and so that's that's sort of in a nutshell and then of course the act and then a lot of family material all of that was left to Hardeen with the understanding that his act would be destroyed or Hardeen's death.
So that's how it played out in the will and there was some complications with that and it went through probate and what's really exciting was that this is this was brand new research and I really want to credit Amanda Zimmerman at the Library of Congress who really helped with this and helped really dig through the the collection files there to see how it all played out. This has been a big question for former curators here at the Center, former curators at the Library of Congress but what happened was the Librarian of Congress himself came to the Houdini home in New York and Bess Houdini gave him a tour and said the magic books are the ones here in this big shelf along the back wall and then all the spiritualism books are piled up in the room here and that's what you're gonna get and that turned out to be over 5,000 volumes and over
120 scrapbooks and all of that went to the Library of Congress within within weeks of that visit and it was really also in the will. Bess was the one who was designated as the executor and it says very specifically that she's the one who will make the decisions about what these things mean what does it mean the magic library and that kind of thing so all of that got broken up there were a lot of people asking about the dramatic library which you know the newspapers were salivating I mean this the stories about this collection were legendary and so people had been asking about it and she had turned them down multiple times because she was hoping to sell it for a large sum of money and and also a lot of the people were asking too early and so the probate came out in March of 1927 the Library of Congress picked up their
stuff the next month in May she gets this letter from a guy named Messmore Kendall who's a real estate developer in New York is credited with being the first purpose building the first purpose-built movie theater in Manhattan the Capitol Theatre and he had gotten outbid on a bookcase that had belonged to a theater manager named Augustin Daly and Houdini was the one who won the bookcase and for many years it held Houdini's dramatic library in it and Kendall when he saw Houdini had died this was his opportunity to get that bookcase again so he he wrote to Bess asking if he could you could come and look at it and the story is that she not only sold him the bookcase but offered him the contents and said there was at least 26 crates worth of material in storage and she would sell and sell him the lot and all of that got piled up
and and into his apartment and over the Capitol Theatre which is just off of Times Square at the time the Library of Congress opened the collection they cataloged it and it opened in January of 1928 and one of the first people at the door was a guy named Henry Ridgely Evans Evans was the was a great biographer and historian and magic and at one point Houdini had planned to do a big book project with Evans and it all sort of fell apart but Evans had always wanted really access to Houdini's collection and he was the one who had suggested that he placed the collection at the Library of Congress because Evans worked down the road at the Department of the Interior and so really was it was very selfish on his part so he was the he was there day one when the collection opened he was one of the first people through the door
in January of 1928 and he shows up wanting to really work on this big biography he'd been planning on Cagliostro and he says well where is it where's where's all these documents related to the diamond necklace affair where is where are all the prints and engravings of all the famous magicians the the photographs the the letters all of the stuff that he'd been collecting for years none of that was in the collection and he wrote to Bess and Bess wrote back that the collection all of that material had been filed in with a dramatic library by Houdini's library and Mr.
Becks Alfred Becks and so all of that had been sold to Messmore Kendall. Kendall had it in his apartment until he decided to retire to Florida in 1957 and originally offered it to the New York Public Library who didn't at the time they didn't have the space or the funds this was before the Lincoln Center Library was built and so the curator there knew that the University of Texas at Austin was starting this major research library and performing arts and that they had a donor a guy named Karl Hoblitzelle who was a vaudeville impresario that had been buying you know significant collections for the University and and convinced the donor to buy it for the University this time so the Kendall collection arrived at the University of Texas in 1958.
You're right though that there was absolutely you know there was a huge amount of material that went to the Library of Congress an enormous amount of material that also came to the to the Ransom Center including a lot of his personal papers that sort of got swept up in the dramatic library and then there was a lot of stuff that was just abandoned at the house that Bess was so eager to get out of that house that things were left there. Also what I've been finding in the research was that Bernard Ernst the Houdini's longtime lawyer had had collected a lot of things from the house and from Bess and had been giving things away to other people as well so a lot of the material that would end up in the John Mulholland collection that's now with David Copperfield a lot of that had actually come through to Mulholland through Ernst.
And so it was complicated so actually some of them some of the interesting Houdini items that are more personal very little of what the Library of Congress got was actually about Houdini himself it was it was his collection so the things that the Library of Congress now has that are extraordinary pieces about Houdini's life a lot of that came through the McManus Young Library which was partially bought from Hardeen's family after Hardeen died in the 1940s. So it's all of this is a very complicated story but it's all to say that I think a lot of people who especially who listen to your podcasts are collectors themselves historians themselves and know how these collections sometimes get broken up and really it's extraordinary that any of it survives at all not just after Houdini's death but the fact that Houdini was able to lay hands on any of these things some of it dating back hundreds
of years it's it's every little item in these collections is something of a miracle.
Dean Carnegie: Wow well you just answered half the questions I have for you okay so that I mean the the the history of the collection and where it went and I didn't expect you to know the the Smithsonian information
Eric Colleary: That's all the Library of Congress
Dean Carnegie: Yeah yeah that is oh yeah the Library of Congress that is that is incredible so you mentioned the Houdini bookcase and I just want to mention to to the listeners this is not the famous bookcase that Houdini stood in front of and had a photo and now that particular bookcase is in the David Copperfield collection this is a completely different bookcase you mentioned where where it originated now do you have that today?
Eric Colleary: We do have that today it's an extraordinary piece of furniture like I said that belonged to the actor manager Augustin Daly who owned several theaters back before Broadway the theater district used to be in Herald Square and he had a big big theater collection these were custom built bookcases so Houdini acquired the bookcase because it had this lineage in theater history that was really quite extraordinary there's a lot of interviews with Houdini where reporters go in into his home and they talk about the different collections and this bookcase is specifically singled out on more than one occasion Houdini describes it as the Augustin Daly bookcase he describes it as belonging you know holding his theater library there's one reporter who says you know there's it's such a big bookcase it's nine feet square he says you know there's there's really interesting items on the top shelves and Houdini climbs up on boxes in front of
the bookcase to get there if you've seen the pictures of Houdini and his home with this is the library you know it's it is it is borderline hoarding but I think you know one of the questions I had always wondered was whether or not you know you use you meet collectors occasionally who you know they they get material and they open you know they never open the packages it's just sort of sitting there Houdini was very much he knew what he had so even though it's like piled up on the floor you know floor-to-ceiling he stayed up he told people he stayed up and I believe him to like four in the morning most nights reading reading the material he often told reporters that he looked forward to retiring from the stage and spending his remaining days with his wife and his library it was really really important to him an incredible story at one
point where he's filming Terror Island and he's in a plane going to Catalina Island and they they had turbulence and he writes to his library and I could think of nothing else but my wife and my collection it's it's a it was it was really central to him and I I guess one of the things that I find so important about it is that if you if you're at all a Houdini fan or even a magic history fan broadly I think what a person collects and how they collected speaks volumes about who they are as a person what their interests are what their ethics are what their values are what their resources are and their networks and friends and you know how they were able to make it all happen and you can read that and see a different side of Houdini than certainly the one that he presented to the public
Dean Carnegie: Oh most certainly well the fact that he was collecting this stuff in that time period is rather unique I mean magicians weren't collecting or well as a whole magicians weren't collecting things back then so I think he picked up a collection from a from a gentleman over in Europe and whose name escapes me at the moment but that that gentleman had a collection of stuff Houdini acquired I think all of it eventually but you know I don't think Howard Thurston and Harry Keller and these guys I don't think they were building libraries full of stuff Houdini was the exception and thankfully so because it preserved at least in the in the magic part of it you know volumes that would have been clearly lost now the dramatic side that that has to be I don't you know you would know better than me whether the there are collectors in the in that the dramatic world
that you know that go back that far or was it similar to the magic world I mean it
Eric Colleary: There were definitely collectors I mean I what's extraordinary to me about the magic community is that often the history is baked into the magic itself so when you're learning a trick you're also you're learning it from someone else who learned it from someone else who learned someone else and they're they're sort of sharing that history but they're also aware oftentimes of like okay well this person did this trick this way and then this person took it and did something different so you're learning the different variations with it and that was certainly the case and that's how Houdini really got started collecting was he was interested in that history and those tricks so that he could understand like even you know when when he died there's a famous interview famous to me now it was a magic when I found this but he they they caught Malini and in his hotel lobby and this reporter and
they said you know Mr. Malini now that Houdini has died has his have his secrets died with him and Malini laughed as he's you know smoking his cigar and he says no you know Houdini was great at what he did but he wasn't an originator if you want to know his secrets look to his library which was like obviously like well that's that's the introduction for my my book I couldn't have asked for a better one than that but yeah it's he meant he meets this guy Evanion when he's on tour yeah Henry Evans Evanion who Jim Hagee has written an incredible book about him Evanion had collected this inherited this amazing collection from another magician James Savran and this is like you know over 200 years worth of incredible magic history that was sitting in his basement in London and Houdini ends up acquiring the bulk of it and some of this ends up
also getting left to the British Museum and is now at the British Library but it was truly an incredible collection what you find also in Houdini's letters with other magicians is like is that there are other magicians who are interested in collecting but nobody who's really able to get at the scale that Houdini is working on so there's a letter for example in the collections from from Thurston to Ellison the very the very famous magic collection that's now at the New York Public Library where he offers over a thousand dollars to Ellison for his collection which ends up not working out but Thurston's trying to build up a library but it's hard to compete with Houdini who's built these relationships with dealers all over the world and they're keeping an eye out for things and will sell it sent him things on account in terms of the Dramatic Library Houdini doesn't really start collecting intentionally
theater history until around 1915 when he realizes he's been collecting playbills for years you know in bulk he goes to Leeds at one point on his tour and there's this guy who salvaged hundreds of thousands of playbills from the local library who had thrown them out because they decided not to collect you know collect them anymore and Houdini buys the entire lot and they they're tied up in bundles that he sends them back to New York and they sit in his basement for six years before he starts having this conversation with a guy named Quincy Kilby who's a manager the former treasurer of the Boston Theatre and Kilby is also a collector of theater history and he's convinced trying to convince Houdini like don't go into theater history there's too many people who have amazing collections out there you can't possibly build a big theater collection but you could really focus in on something specific
like Edwin Booth or the Booth family there's still really good material out there but Houdini's like great I'll think about that but also you know come to think of it I've got all these playbills in my basement and it turns out you know there's New York playbills in that collection that date back to the 1770s and you know early London playbills dating back to the 1740s they don't exist many of these don't exist in any other library or any other collection in the world and it's only because Houdini had the foresight to collect it the New York Public Library's collection largely doesn't even start their playbill holdings until the 1860s after the Civil War there's a century's worth of playbills that Houdini has been collecting before that it's truly an extraordinary collection
Dean Carnegie: Fascinating you had mentioned Henry Ridgely Evans a few years back I had a had a show in in DC and when it was over I turned to my assistant and I said she said well what are we gonna do now I'm like oh oh well you're not gonna believe it but we're going we're going to a cemetery and she said what and I'm like oh yeah yeah so cuz we've done this before we do this all the time so I went to a cemetery in Washington where Henry Ridgely Evans is buried yeah almost killed myself because the cemetery so old that the the the paths and everything were super slick it was raining but sure enough we found it we found his grave I took some pictures and then as we were leaving the cemeteries right next to this mansion that sits gated mansion and I look at it and I'm like wait a minute
there's something about this softly familiar we'll come to find out in his book new the new and old magic he mentions when he's younger and he wants to perform for the first time and he gets a gig at a particular place in Washington DC where he performs and it the whole thing's a disaster and this turned out to be the place where he performed this this
Eric Colleary: Oh wow oh man
Dean Carnegie: Right next to the cemetery where he was buried so that was a fascinating thing yeah to stumble upon by accident
Eric Colleary: He was a character he he ended up writing that Cagliostro biography and writing to Messmore Kendall to actually have access he did finally get access to that Cagliostro material that Houdini kept from him he originally Houdini had he'd gotten a copy around 1902 of Thomas Frost's Lives of the Conjurers and there were so many factual errors in that book that it really pissed him off to the point that that's actually fueled so much of his early collecting was to to really build the collection that would allow him to write a better version of Lives of the Conjurers and Evans was gonna ghost write that at one point for him and there's incredible letters between the two of them over a period of time where Evans is sending him drafts of the manuscript and Houdini is just getting so angry and he says you know you're falling into the same traps that Frost did and all
these other people that's not true this is not right this is not factually correct and Evans says and responds he says I know it's not correct but you're sitting on the material I need to make it correct either either you do this yourself or you let me have access to it but this is the best I could do with what I've got so it's it was a complicated relationship between the two of them but but thankfully well documented in the archives
Dean Carnegie: Wow fascinating fascinating okay so before before we started recording I asked you a question and I'll just further my listeners I'll just tell you what it was Houdini had a lot of posters during his career but we know that there are some posters that he had that that did not survive there are no existing copies and the reason we know this is there are photos of the front of theaters and you see the the posters on the wall but those posters they're you know none exist anymore I've always been of the belief that Houdini is gonna have a poster for anything that's really big in his show and there's nothing bigger in his show than the vanishing elephant and there is no vanishing elephant poster that we know of but I've always believed that sure enough there has to be a vanishing elephant poster now a couple years ago you and John Cox over at
Wild About Harry had a had had a revelation and and I think you said it's in the exhibit so could you tell us about that
Eric Colleary: Yeah so this has been part of the collection and a well-known part of the collection really since the 1950s when it arrived here but there are two what look like two prototype designs for a vanishing elephant poster that are in watercolor slightly different styles certainly a different color scheme one of them that has a sort of like a vaguely Egyptian border around it but certainly advertising the vanishing elephant at the Hippodrome and it's not entirely clear if either of these were ever made but certainly there were clearly designs for them the Ransom Center also holds in the Houdini papers a newspaper grant banner advertising the the vanishing elephant but it doesn't have any images on it and unfortunately because it's newsprint it's it's brittle and a little chunk of it it seems to be missing but the that's also in the collection John and I when John came to visit and did some research here
he found an incredible letter from Houdini to a guy named Kit Clark who was a good friend of his an elderly theater agent and and Kit Clark was too sick to come see Houdini perform the vanishing elephant act and as a as a gesture sent promises to send him a poster of the vanishing elephant act and that was for John clear evidence that one had been made but it's wild that they don't seem to survive he would think that would be one that people would would absolutely want to preserve so we don't have any of the actual prints but we do have the two prototype designs
Dean Carnegie: That's fascinating well the vanishing elephant and the other one I'm convinced there was a poster was walking through a brick wall those two I mean they're just iconic Houdini effects and he had posters for everything of that nature so I'm sure there were you know a vanishing elephant poster and walking through a brick wall poster unfortunately they don't survive so we all I guess we'll never know unless unless you know one wild ways
Eric Colleary: Yeah so we just we did a big restoration recently on a Hardeen poster that's in the collection that seems to be the only surviving copy but it's it's the exact same poster of a Houdini but the but the face has been replaced by Hardeen but it's the St. Paul printing company and so we've just done a treatment for that that's also in the exhibition right now
Dean Carnegie: Is that a is that a the milk can poster or is that
Eric Colleary: No it's a it's a handcuff poster so Hardeen with some police officers and his hands crossed in front of him with a hand handcuffs on yeah it's a it's a wonderful poster and a few others like that in the collection that Houdini had collected himself that seemed to be the only surviving posters of their kind certainly a very well-known now poster of Vermont of Herman an evening in spirit land that seems to be the only surviving one of its kind beautiful full-color lithograph
Dean Carnegie: Amazing now I went on your website I was looking you know at the various pictures and there's there's actually a photo on there of a poster I was not familiar with that is it's a Houdini poster from one of his movies looks like a very long three sheet where he's hanging off a cliff can you tell us about that one
Eric Colleary: Yeah that was from Man from Beyond so this was this is extraordinary too because it's it seems surprising that there don't seem to be full-color lithographs of the Man from Beyond posters but we you know the press kit that went out to theaters has all of the different variations of the Man from Beyond posters that they were the the company was offering for advertising but these are Houdini's own set of the actual posters themselves so there's a three sheet there's a one sheet and then there's a couple others that are all from from that film it's really really great to have those in the collection and yes the three sheet Man from Beyond is currently part of the exhibition now here at the Ransom Center and that runs through the end of January of 2027
Dean Carnegie: Wow Wow okay so I know just from looking at the website I have not been to the exhibit yet but I will make a trip before before it closes you have posters on display books photos are there any like artifacts like I think I saw a ball and chain or something but and there and there's a strange thing hanging on the wall it looks like it could be jewelry or a costume part can you tell us about any of the artifacts that you have
Eric Colleary: Yeah it's it is a paper-heavy exhibition that's that's sort of really what was mostly in Houdini's library so there's letters there's there's photos you know interestingly there's a letter from Georges Méliès where Méliès is offering Houdini several of the original Robert Houdin automaton several of which are now in the Copperfield Library and Houdini clearly doesn't take him up on this he's not really he collects some magic tricks from other magicians mainly to perform them but he doesn't he's not really a collector of historic magic tricks himself so or the apparatuses or illusions or anything like that there's a whole case on historical historic locks and lock picking that includes a ball and chain from the collection that that case has you know books dating back to the 1700s about lock mechanisms that Houdini had in his library so that he could understand how the mechanisms worked there's also yeah this incredible replica of the diamond
necklace that sort of figured prominently in the affair the diamond necklace in France in the late 1700s this is part of a sort of a collection of material related to the diamond necklace affair that Houdini was able to acquire from an English book dealer this this is always sort of pointed out in the interviews about Houdini's library as an example of like the breadth the historical breadth of Houdini's collection and he was really proud of it it was an incident that helped lead to the French Revolution what it turns out was really that he was interested in Cagliostro who was a major sort of central figure in this scandal and there's original letters and manuscripts related to Cagliostro and the four trials which related to Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI so yeah so there's that replica of the necklace that was sort of at the center of that case and of course the bookcase itself
which which stands right in the center of the exhibition so not a whole lot of objects but a lot of books and a lot of the photographs including Houdini's own personal photos he he had a camera with him whenever he went on tour he was taking photos his assistants were taking photos many of those glass plate negatives in prints are part of the Ransom Center's collection including over 130 of the glass plate negative some of which are only just being published now for the first time in the companion book
Dean Carnegie: Okay oh that's that's good I was gonna ask you what is different between the exhibit and the book that's that's so so the in the book we're actually going to see some photos that have not been seen
Eric Colleary: Absolutely yeah some extraordinary photos for example there's photographs of Houdini with a prototype of the Water Torture Cell where he it's it's made out of wood at that point where it seems like these photos are being taken by an assistant so that Houdini gets a sense of what it looks like from the outside but he's sort of hanging suspended under upside down from it extraordinary photographs of his tours where you know they're sitting on top of a cart with all these boxes going to the next theater and you know they're just taking a photograph of like the Royal Exchange in London as they're passing it on the cart so they're they're really an incredible documentation of life on the road so there's things like that in it the book really tells the story in detail about Houdini as a collector from his father Rabbi Weiss all the way through Houdini's death and the afterlife of
the collection there's over 700 images in the book there's only about only 260 to 300 items in the exhibition depending on how you count and so there's a lot more in the book than what we were able to fit in the exhibition the exhibit really tells the story in a very concentrated and narrative way and the book is really including a lot more stories than we were able to do in the physical space deeply grateful to a number of different collectors to who not only provided images but you know people like David Copperfield who has an incredible site inventory of the magic collection that Houdini clearly typed himself and includes a number of comments on specific titles things that you know the publisher should be dragged out and shot for putting this out on the market this is an exact ripoff of somebody else's book and they don't even give them credit or this is
a really good book about swindling that you know I learned a few things from so there's excerpts of that for example that are in the book that are really a lot of fun anybody who's interested in collecting I think will really find that the book and the exhibit both are it's a love letter really to the idea of collecting
Dean Carnegie: Hmm I love that so I do have one question it may not pertain to the exhibit but you have and you can tell me how many you have a lot of Houdini scrapbooks in your collection and one of the ones in particular and I don't remember how I stumbled upon it but I had remembered reading something about Samri Baldwin had had a some stuff he I think he was gonna give it to Thurston or whatever never got to him and it ended up with Houdini Kitty Baldwin ended up giving it to Houdini and that scrapbook ended up in in the Harry Ransom collection that you have yes so what else you're how many just how many scrapbooks are there
Eric Colleary: Yeah so most of the scrapbooks really did go to the Library of Congress and that was sort of just again geographically where they were in the house at the time which is really sort of extraordinary we ended up with the Baldwin scrapbook because it wasn't kept with the others at that moment at the moment that Houdini died have been moved somewhere else same thing you know we have Houdini's copy his first edition copy of the the discovery of witchcraft is actually here at the Ransom Center instead of with the Magic Library at the Library of Congress only because at that moment that book was somewhere else in the house so you know the Baldwin scrapbook was it's it's a truly beautiful it's Baldwin's own personal touring scrapbook and it's got extraordinary images from his childhood all the way through his career and there's a wonderful letter in there from Sam from Shadow Baldwin to Houdini
after Samri Baldwin died offering it to him for the collection a couple years ago actually really quite extraordinary at the Potter and Potter auctions I was able to get a letter the actual letter from Houdini to Shadow Baldwin thanking her for giving him this scrapbook and saying when I die I'm leaving my he calls it his mystery books in that letter his mystery books to to the Congressional Library which yeah and when I when I decide to shuffle off this mortal life he says so it's a it's an extraordinary thing to have it was clearly his intention that that scrapbook would go to the Library of Congress but again where it was in the house and ultimately Bess was named executor and it specifically says in the will she would be able to she would be the one to determine what would go where so so there it is but it's what's extraordinary to me
too is that these two large parts of the collection have landed both at the Library of Congress and at the Ransom Center both institutions have really done a lot over the years to care for it to make it accessible in both instances anybody with the photo ID can set up a research account you don't need to be a credentialed academic you don't need to be working on a project you can come in and use this material for whatever you want even if you're just curious and want to browse that's really important to us so and that's really the bread and butter of what with these institutions do it's there as a research library that occasionally gets to put things out on exhibit
Dean Carnegie: Fascinating fascinating all right I have one more question for you I was not familiar with this person but I had to look him up and then I went oh how ironic so among the items that Houdini had in his collection was the travel diary of a man named David Garrick can you tell us a little bit about him and then the conduction to Houdini which I'm assuming you know what I'm talking
Eric Colleary: Yeah David Garrick it was one of the most famous actors on the English stage after Shakespeare he lived in the 18th century moved up the ranks and became the actor manager the sort of owner of the theater royal Drury Lane one of the sort of three major theaters in London at the time David Garrick really did so much to make English theater a thing and certainly make Shakespeare Shakespeare the fact that we remember Shakespeare today for example was really owed in many ways to David Garrick and his memorializations so a lot of a lot of in there's a lot of interest in theater historians on Garrick he is able to get a copy of David Garrick's travel diary the actual original handwritten diary through Maggs Bros.
the same booksellers in London who get him not only the Cagliostro letters but also the the discovery of witchcraft volumes we know exactly how much he paid for Maggs Bros. incidentally is still very much active and a family business in London today Wow but this travel diary is it's from 1751 Garrick is going from England to France for the first time is descended from French Huguenots so it's a really meaningful trip to him and it's it's hilarious you can sort of see that he goes to the Comédie-Française and attends the theater and it sort of validates in his mind the superiority of the English stage and it goes missing for years biographers know that it is a thing because Garrick in the 1780s it goes back to the France and says I'm not gonna write much about it now because I did so much my last diary but it goes missing it turns out it's
in private hands and who when Houdini acquires it he's the first one who makes it accessible for research there's a graduate student who ends up writing her dissertation about it and then Houdini dies and she gets permission from Messmore Kendall to do to publish a transcription of a full full transcription so a really important piece and just one of many extraordinary examples of priceless unique items that relate to the broader theater history really part of Houdini's larger mission to professionalize magic and just have it have it seen as the art that it is on the stature of the legitimate theater
Dean Carnegie: Amazing now the the other the connection that I was referring to Houdini dies in Detroit the last place he performs the Garrick theater after David Garrick absolutely totally ironic that that would be the name of the last place he ever performs and he has this travel diary in there as well and I'm glad you shared more history of David Garrick because I was not familiar with the magnitude of how important he was so that's that is that is great I appreciate that so the Houdini library exhibit it runs it's currently running now it runs till January 24th 2027 on September 17th you will be doing a special reading and discussion of your book at the Harry Ransom Center and the most important thing is how do we get a copy of your book
Eric Colleary: Oh you can it's a great question thank you for asking it you can get a copy anywhere you can get fine books so I have a wonderful publisher Abbeville Press who's put together really beautiful volume you can get it directly through their website abbeville.com or you can get it through amazon.com or anywhere you get your books from it's a it's a hefty 25-pound book I believe so it's it's gonna sit very nicely on your coffee table and there's not just about Houdini but so much about magic history and theater history and performance more broadly in that something in it for everybody I think
Dean Carnegie: Wow well Eric thank you so much for being on the Magic Detective podcast and sharing this has been incredible I've learned so much and it's been fascinating so thank you so much for being here today
Eric Colleary: I'm honored thank you very much for having me here
Dean Carnegie: My pleasure and we will we will talk soon in person when I come visit the exhibit
Eric Colleary: I can't wait
Dean Carnegie: You take care
Eric Colleary: You too
And that my friends was Dr. Eric Colleary the curator of performing arts at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin Texas talking about his new book and exhibit on Houdini's library by the way before I go very far yes I know the difference between the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress I for some reason I've got the Smithsonian on my brain every time I meant to say Library of Congress I said Smithsonian so forgive me for that that was just a little hiccup in my my head - spending too much time doing research this week anyway if you like this episode please be sure to like it in any way that your podcasting provider allows also if you happen to be on Apple podcasts I've got a bunch of five-star reviews over there and if you'd like to add another one that would be awesome if you don't like the podcast hey send me an email
and tell me why but so far I think the listeners are pretty happy until next time keep your feet on the ground and keep reaching that's sorry that's the wrong one here it is until next time be well and stay safe
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