This is the transcript of episode 117 of the Magic Detective Podcast, Charles Greene Author of Exposing Houdini. Listen to the full episode here. The transcript was generated automatically, so expect a few spelling slips.
This is episode 117 of The Magic Detective Podcast. On this episode, we talk with author Charles Greene about his new book, "Exposing Houdini". That and more on this episode of The Magic Detective Podcast. Well, I have just now officially gotten out two podcast episodes back to back within a week of each other. Amazing! I'm going to continue, or at least try to continue in the same fashion for the next several weeks, giving you new episodes fairly often. And going forward for a while, they're all going to be Houdini related.
Which brings me to today's episode. I have a wonderful guest with me today, Mr. Charles Greene. Now, Charles is a full-time professional magician. He's a corporate magician, a trade show magician. He's worked with many major corporations over the years, and that's how he's earned his living. He was a restaurant magician at one time. He even worked at Six Flags at one time, but he made his career as a trade show magician. But interestingly enough, Charles is also a magic historian. And not just a magic historian, he's a magic collector and a magic author.
He wrote the great book on Ionia that came out recently, and he has one of the largest private collections of magic posters in the world. And he is, on top of all of that, a super nice guy, and I'm proud to have him here today on the Magic Detective podcast. So, without further ado, let's bring in Charles Greene.
Interview with Charles Greene, author of Exposing Houdini
Dean Carnegie: And now we have our guest, Charles Greene. He is the author of the book Exposing Houdini. And this is a very interesting book, a very different kind of book when it comes to Houdini stuff. And Charles has a whole adventure that goes with it, a whole story. But before we get into things, I have to ask a question. Now, when I think of, and by the way, welcome to the podcast, I should say.
Charles Greene: Thanks very much, Dean. Good morning.
Dean Carnegie: Good morning. So when I think of Houdini people, names that come to mind, Milbourne Christopher, Amazing Randi, Pat Culliton, John Cox, myself, I don't always think of, well, I don't think of Charles Greene in that list. But just to be fair, our mutual friend, Wayne Allen, is a Houdini guy. He's been writing a book on Houdini for 30 years, and he doesn't come to the top of the mind to most people either. So my question for you is, were you like a Houdini guy? We just didn't know about it?
Or how does that go?
Charles Greene: I am not a Houdini guy, honestly, and to be included on that list with you, Pat Culliton, John Cox, Milbourne Christopher. I mean, that's really a dream come true, or it's really like amazing, because all of this started when I was a kid. So as a kid, I was introduced to Houdini almost immediately. I grew up in Hackensack, New Jersey, and downtown there was a bookstore called Warm Raphs on Main Street, and two of the books I picked up when I first started Magic were Expert Card Technique by Braue, which is not really a beginner's book.
And I also picked up The Illustrated History of Magic by Milbourne Christopher. So kind of like from day one, Houdini has always been there. And I think for most magicians, no matter what you pick up, what you read about in Magic, he's gonna be there on day one, day two, day three. He's coming in pretty soon, and he just stays with you forever. So I'm not a Houdini guy. I'm not a Houdini collector. This collection literally fell into my lap because of serendipity.
Dean Carnegie: Amazing, amazing. Okay, well, go ahead and give us how this happened. Tell us what transpired to make this whole thing take place.
Charles Greene: Well, it simply was pure luck and just the notion of doing something and going the extra mile. As a solo performer, I've been a professional magician all my life, and I know that if I don't do it, no one's going to do it for me. It's just a thing of my life. So I was told about this auction in Ohio that had a few Houdini pieces in them. And I went to the website, I saw the listing. The listing was very, very vague. It basically said Houdini images, glass plates, and that was about it.
I mean, there's only like four lines of text or so. There were some pictures, but because they were glass plate negatives, they were mostly dark images. So in my mind, I thought, I don't know what this is, so I'm going to call them. So I called them. I didn't get much information, but I did ask them two questions. The first one was, well, can I see them in advance? And they said, yes, you may. It's open to everyone. There's a preview. And it was actually these plates were part of a two week sale of abandoned safe deposit box materials.
So just like today, someone goes out and buys storage containers in groups and they sell all the stuff that's in them. That's what this was. So this had been abandoned property. And with abandoned property of this nature, there's a five year waiting period before the items can be sold. So this person passed away at least five years. So I went there. And oh, the second question I asked them was, when I'm there, can I take photographs of them? They said, yes. So I went to Ohio, flew into Cleveland, flew into Columbus, Ohio, grabbed a car, drove an hour to a place called Newark.
And there I was introduced to the room and there's a big room because most of the items there of the two week sale were shiny objects such as coins, stamps, jewelry watches. And I asked for the two lots and there were two separate lots. So you get one lot at a time. The first lot was brought out to me in a cardboard tray. There were approximately seven or eight boxes, old, scuffed up. I opened the first box. I pulled out a slide and I realized, looking at it to the light, I had never seen that image before of Houdini.
Well, I went through all the boxes and realized that they were all mostly Houdini or centered on Houdini. So I just gave that lot away, returned it, and I was always supervised during this process. The other lot was brought to me. I opened up that set of boxes. Same thing. I was in amazement as I saw images I had never seen before. Or if they were images I had seen, they were iconic, such as with the milk can, him in the airplane, him with best things of that nature.
I took photographs of all of them and I spent two hours taking photographs in the room and other people at the same time were in there and also taking photographs of those plates and other things in the room. Before I left the room, before I left the auction house, I backed up all of my materials onto a hard drive and flew back to Washington, D.C. Now, I did have special equipment. I had talked to someone at the Library of Congress and I said, "I don't know what I'm going to see there.
It could be just pictures from a book or it could be something really special. I have no idea. But what do I need if it's a glass negative?" They said, "Well, you need to bring a few things. You need to bring a light source," which I did. "You can buy them on Amazon." One day I got them the next day. "You should have a tripod." And then they said, "You're going to need a dust bulb because you don't want to touch them because they're extremely fragile.
They really even shouldn't be out in the light. And then you're going to need a camera." I said, "Well, I don't have a fancy camera." And I said, "All I have is really an iPhone." I was told that would be fine. As long as it's on a tripod, that'll be fine for taking these images. And that was it.
Dean Carnegie: Wow. Wow. Okay. Well, I've seen the book. I've seen the images. Here's a question. Now, you and I have talked about this before, where they came from.
Charles Greene: Yes.
Dean Carnegie: Origin. I'm wondering, because we had a conversation once. You asked me if I had this. Do you have this?
Charles Greene: I have that. Yes.
Dean Carnegie: You do have it. Okay.
Charles Greene: Not only do I have that, I have spoken to the person who created that.
Dean Carnegie: Okay. And then for our listeners...
Charles Greene: Joe Tanner is alive.
Dean Carnegie: Oh, okay. Okay. Great. Great. Okay. So he is alive. So you have talked to him.
Charles Greene: He is alive. I have talked to him. You know, so much of this stuff in history is like, you know, you go to reach out to someone and it's like, "Oh, they died last year. Oh, they died last week."
Dean Carnegie: Yeah.
Charles Greene: But Joe Tanner is very much alive. We've had a conversation about the catalog, the slides, the negatives, the pictures that came from the negatives. So I've gotten a much clearer picture as to where these things came from.
Dean Carnegie: Interesting. Now, did he... I was looking through the catalog this morning, and of course it says in there, and I think you mentioned it in your book as well, that they likely came from the Dunninger Collection via a gentleman named Rick Sizmer. And there's even a letter in the catalog from Rick, a letter from Mrs. Dunninger, but I noticed this morning that the letter from Rick only talks about locks and restraints. It has nothing to do with the other stuff. So very curious your thoughts on that.
Charles Greene: Well, you know, I have a lot of time, and I do a lot of... I make a lot of phone calls, and so I kind of find these threads, you go down these rabbit holes. So I have talked to someone who knew Richard Sizmer. There's always a thing about how to pronounce his name. So I knew someone who was his best friend outside of magic, but knew him for years in Canada. I talked to another friend who was a good friend of his who worked with him in Canada and knew him very well.
So here's the story as I've pieced it together. And this is really the first time I've got this in one place, and I'm sharing it with everyone.
Dean Carnegie: Love it. Yeah.
Charles Greene: So, Joe Tanner and the catalog, there are pictures in that catalog which dovetail with pictures and images from the negatives that I saw in Ohio. They're not exactly the same. Then there are pictures... Oh, there are negatives that were available from Joe Tanner. Together, it lets us know that most likely these pictures in the catalog and the negatives that he saw all came from the same set of negatives at one point. So that's where it breaks. And Joe Tanner never met Richard Sizmer, which I found interesting.
I didn't know. So he never met Richard. This was at a time when Joe was in Montana, and Richard at the time was in Canada, in Ontario. Okay, so that's one side. We go to the other side of this puzzle. The slides came from Houdini. They were definitely Houdini's property. There are things written by Houdini, by Kugel, by the assistants that are on the labels. They then go to Joseph Dunninger. Dunninger passes away. Richard Sizmer hears about the passing of Dunninger and Mrs. Dunninger living in the house, and he sends her a letter saying, "Hey, I'd like to come down and visit."
Mrs. Dunninger says, "Sure, come on down," and invites him to the house in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. Richard is there for a period of months, over a period of maybe a year or so. He has access to the house. He's painting. And he's been involved with magic. He knows about magic. He had a show. He was an escape artist. He knew about magic items. So he had total access to the house. At some point, the daughter of Joseph Dunninger comes to the house with her husband and says, "You know, some things seem to be missing from the house.
Things are not here that were here." And so they instituted or began to say, "I think he needs to leave. I think Richard needs to leave and not come back." At some point, she created a suit, actually sued Richard for certain items. But as the case went on, he came to trial. She did not. And so the case was dismissed.
Dean Carnegie: Interesting.
Charles Greene: So that's where we are with knowing that items have been taken from the Dunninger house and then wind up with Richard Sizmer somehow. Now, we know that items wind up with Richard Sizmer because the two people that I mentioned earlier who actually knew him have told me that they had glass negatives in a box that came from Richard Sizmer. Richard Sizmer gave it to one, gave a box of negatives to one person, told that person to hold on to them. That person thought that they were a gift and then was surprised that when Richard took them back later.
But that's what took place. The other person told me that Richard Sizmer would go down to New Jersey, spend some time, come back and have gifts that he said, Richard, were gifts from Mrs. Dunninger. So that's what we have. The other thing is that if you start looking into this, Richard Sizmer created a paper trail. If you go on Magic Cafe, the old meeting group for people before I think before Facebook, Richard Sizmer is on there and he talks about being with Mrs. Dunninger, the slides, the items.
And he says, I'm giving items away. I'm letting them go. I really don't care. And then he says specifically, I've given items to someone that no one knows and I'm not telling and no one will ever know where they are. Now, it's my belief. This is what he put in print. It's on the web. You can go look at this now. It's my belief that these negatives may have been in the safe deposit box of that person. We'll just call them person X.
Dean Carnegie: Yeah.
Charles Greene: Only other thing is that these negatives may have been with Richard Sizmer because at some point he lived in Arizona, went back to Ontario, but Richard Sizmer died young. He died of a heart attack unexpectedly in his living room in a chair while watching TV. So Richard may have had them and then they were in a safety deposit box or person X may have had them in a safety deposit box and they passed away. But we definitely know that Richard Sizmer had access to Dunninger items, brought back gifts to Canada.
And we know that Richard Sizmer intentionally gave things to someone else with the idea that they would not be found and would not be known for a very, very long time.
Dean Carnegie: Wow. Wow. Okay. Well, I know it's a lot to unpack. Yeah. I knew Richard, but very towards the end of his life. Okay. And I didn't know him well. I'm trying to think about, I mean, I met him through Steve Baker, the escape artist. Okay, sure. He and Steve would talk every now and then on the phone. And Steve and I talked every day on the phone. Wow. So that's how I got introduced to Rick, but I didn't. I remember at some point the Dunninger name coming up.
I honestly never made the connection of Dunninger Houdini and all this other stuff. So when it came about that his name came up, I was like, oh, oh, what's this? And then all of it kind of as it came out, I'm like, oh man, I didn't know anything about this. And I did know, I remember when he passed away because it was like you said, it was, I think Steve had talked to him one day and the next day we got a phone call from his fiance or an email from his fiance saying he died.
And we're like, what? So that is, it's amazing that you were able to get all of that, but also it helps to kind of fill in the story of the plates as well. That's amazing.
Charles Greene: It is an amazing story. And obviously there's a little bit of a gap, but I feel we're close enough to know where these slides came from. These slides, as it seems to be written by Houdini, these are a part of his collection that he was going to use for his autobiography. And so, you know, the Milbourne Christopher talks about an autobiography that Houdini was writing the draft for. At some point Houdini lost the draft and then gave up the project. And because of the nature of these slides, going from 1903, there are personal slides, there are studio slides, there are just casual slides.
From 1903 to 1911, they kind of fit the genre of what would be used for an autobiographical book.
Dean Carnegie: Okay. Okay. Interesting. Interesting. So you're checking out these slides. You're flying back and forth, you see them, you have copies of them now. At what point did you decide this could be a book?
Charles Greene: So the first point that I got when I went, what really pushed me was when I saw the ad, it's like, I have no idea what's in Ohio, but they've been gone for 100 years because they've been, you know, no one's seen them. If I don't see them or someone doesn't see them, they could be bought by someone, return to another safety deposit box, and no one will see them for another 100 years, no one will know about them. You know, as I always go back to that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, the very last scene is of like, we have the Ark.
Yeah, because it's safe. Don't worry, we have the Ark and you see it just in a warehouse of warehouses with insight. Oh yeah, we've got it, but it's kind of useless at this point because no one knows where it is and no one knows what it is. Yeah, I didn't want that to happen to this. So I just go not knowing what's there. And then I know that these are important. And so my first thing was I want to go and share them with everyone, no matter what I see.
Sure. So here's the chronology of that. I saw them one day on the day of the auction, which was a week later. So I saw them a week before the auction or a few days before the auction. The day of the auction, after the auction was over, because I was bidding on these as well, I sent John Cox images of these negatives. I said, here's the auction that took place today. Here are some slides and images that were in the auction. And so the day of, or maybe the day after the auction, he put them up on his site.
OK. Then a week later, I think he put some more pictures on his Patreon. So they were available for other collectors to see. Then I printed out the negatives as positives and I took them to NEMCA, where you, Bruce Averbook, Ken Trombly, Johnny Gahn, Mike Kaveny, Ben Wynn, a bunch of collectors looked at them. My question was, have you seen anything? Did you know about them? And I heard from people that they knew about the sale. So Ray, Ray Ricard knew about the sale. Bruce Averbook knew about the sale.
Other people knew about the sale. But no one decided to go for whatever reason. And if they had gone, well, things would have been very different.
Dean Carnegie: Oh, for sure. For sure. So, well, OK, here's the next question. You said you were bidding on the plates. Did you, was it sold as just a lot or did they sell them individually and did you get any?
Charles Greene: So there were two lots. I think number 9315 and 9316. So two batches.
Dean Carnegie: Oh, OK. You said that in the beginning. OK.
Charles Greene: All right. So there are two batches and I was able to win the first batch. Nice. I bid on the second batch. I did not win that batch. Someone else won. Interesting. I don't know. How do I just how do I say this? To be correct, I have heard of the person who won the second bid. I have called them repeatedly over the last six months because I only learned who that was in May and I've not heard back from them. So I know I have one batch of negatives.
I'm the only person, it seems, who has the complete set of photographs because I'm the only one who saw them, took photographs of them all and then made positives of them all. And they're all in the book. There is a little problem with glass negatives. This is one of the great things about being the collector. There are always two sides. Glass negatives are extremely fragile. They should be put in archival folders. They need to be climate controlled or they will just disintegrate. Because they are negatives, you cannot just pick them up and hold them.
Not because they're negatives, but you just can't pick them up and you shouldn't put your fingerprints on them. You can't you shouldn't transfer oil onto them. That comes from your body. You should handle them with gloves. They should be kept in low light so that you just can't pull these out and show them to everyone. So as negatives, they're they're wonderful, but yet at the same time, they're also extremely fragile.
Dean Carnegie: Well, that makes sense. I did see a picture when I was researching a little bit of this of I guess it came from the auction house of someone holding one of the glass plates up with their bare fingers and the comments on that particular page was, what is happening here?
Charles Greene: So yes, very true. I mean, you know, I don't want I don't want to like disparage the auction house because this is a this is a high. This is an item that really has historic value and it's extremely fragile and it's not what they do. I mean, they they do picnic baskets. They do farm equipment. They do jewelry. They do a ton of stuff. This is out of their wheelhouse. It's not a specialty. So yes, there are pictures of them holding them up with just their bare hands and holding them at the edges and not the proper way to deal with them.
I do want to say one thing because there's a lot of controversy about my having these negatives and the process of what happened. I do want to say that I have an understanding of why someone else might be a little upset. There were two batches. If you go on to the website for this auction house, which is still up at this moment. And I only notice this the other day when someone asked me for some information. Batch number one, I'll call it 9315. There's only a few pictures of what might be in that batch.
Only a few. If you go to the other one, 9316, there are many more pictures of what might be in that batch. Now, here's what's happened is that both of the descriptions for 9316 and 9315 are the same. What the auction house did, because again, they're going through hundreds of items, is they just took pictures and they just put them together and just put them with those two listings. They didn't separate which picture went with each lot because it's extremely difficult. They only have darkened negatives to work with and they're in boxes and they're fragile and they didn't want to perhaps deal with that.
They said, hey, we know that there are these pictures. We know these are pictures. We'll use the same description. We'll just put these slides up. We'll just put these pictures up and we're done. Let's move on to the other stuff. Someone has made the statement that somehow slides were switched or negatives were switched or that the person who won the second lot did not get what they were expecting to get because they were looking at all the pictures that were under the listing. Now, I understand how they come to that conclusion.
However, that conclusion is false because the pictures did not accurately reflect what was in each batch. I'm the only person who has seen all the batches and have a timeline of when the pictures were taken from each batch.
Dean Carnegie: Interesting. In your own defense, the auction house gave you permission to take the pictures. They stood there with you the entire time. There's nothing that could have happened. I kind of get the controversy, but at the same time, nobody took the wherewithal. Nobody jumped up and said, let's go do this. You were the only one. Kudos to you for having the wherewithal to do that. I wouldn't have thought of it myself. I vaguely remember hearing about the auction, and I say vaguely. I could be wrong.
Houdini stuff is coming up all the time. It may have been something else, but you went out there, you did the research. I think that's fantastic. I'm sorry for the other person, but we've all won things in auctions that weren't exactly what we thought they were going to be. I'm glad you were able to get the first lot. Once you had them, at what point did you go book?
Charles Greene: That was your initial question. It was not until about a year and a half. When I first got them, I had one rule, and someone told me to initiate this rule. The rule was, do not tell anyone you actually have them until you find out who has the other batch, because there could be issues or things could come up. I follow that rule to the T. I would always say, if someone said, "Hey, do you have the slides?" I would always say, "I don't know who has all the negatives."
That doesn't really answer their question, but it does evade the direct thing of, "I have one batch," because I didn't want to go down that line. When I finally learned who had them, I called them repeatedly and never heard anything back from them. Your question was about the negatives and the book. At what point did you decide to make a book out of it? The real thing came about in January of 2016, January of this year. I was at Fred Pittella's during Christmas week. I didn't spend a week.
I was in New York. During that time, I went to see Fred Pittella, who has always invited me out to his house. As you know, he has an amazing collection of Houdini stuff. I was amazed by what he has and how much he has in that size of a space. He said, "Take a look at anything. Allow me to take photographs." I'm very visual, so there's definitely some things I keyed into, which were illustrations. As I'm flipping through things, there are pictures and sketches from a Houdini that we don't see because they're not popular, because they're in smaller manuscripts or maybe programs or newspapers.
I focused on those. When I received those and looked at those later, now we're moving into January, and then I saw the negatives or the positives of the negatives, the images. I thought, "Well, those two go together." I said, "There needs to be a third element. Things go together in groups of three." "Oh, I know. What about if I put contemporaneous articles about each one of the events that's pictured in the negatives?" That's when it came together. In January of this year, 2026, I decided to do a book.
The book could be possible. Then I reached out to someone who had done the Ionia book for me, a great company that's based up in Canada. I said, "I just have some questions." The person, my sales rep, stopped me midway and said, "Hey, when do you want the book?" I thought, "Having it for Bill Smith's Magic Collector Expo would be a really good thing instead of waiting until later. That'd be a really good kickoff." He said, "Okay, great. Here is your timeline. If you want the book to be available for that date, then we need to have your slides on March 1st."
"Now, it's January, probably middle of January." I'm thinking, "Oh, great. That means I've got to get two slides in essentially a month and a half." "I've got to do a book in a month and a half." He said, "Yes." I reached out to two designers, one who had worked on the Ionia book. Her name is Steena Hensley. She's fantastic. She does all of the work for Potter & Potter for catalogs. Then I reached out to a new designer, Jessica, who does work for Jim Hagee. The criteria was, "Can you do this book?
Can you give me your time so that the files will be done by the end of February?" February 28th, the shortest month of the year. One person said, "Yes." I said, "You're my person." We just went forward. The book itself is really not historic. It's not a magic history book. I don't look at it like that. I consider it more of a chronology, more of an art book. I was definitely influenced by Christian Bedford, who had done a book. She's a photographer, and she had done a photo book, and we had talked about that.
Not of magic, just photographs. That really influenced me a lot. I thought, "Well, let's do a photo book for Houdini. Let's make it big, coffee table. Let's really do good paper, a good case for it, hardcover." Jess and I worked together. She only had to play bad cop once to really get me in line, because it's all my fault. I did a lot of archival researching of newspapers in England, France, some Russian papers, German. Richard Hatch helped me out, of course, with translation of German. I'm pretty good with French, American papers.
I put this all together, and then Jess did a marvelous job with design. There are some things in here that are more, how would I say, more art book. There's some information that's not directly tied to every single photograph, but the acknowledgments are in the book. There's one thing at the back of the book. Oh, I had an idea, because I know how the magic world can be and collectors can be. I thought, "Well, let's put a watermark on every single picture in the book, so that you can definitely tell where it came from and who it is from."
She said, "That's really not going to make a better book, and there are ways of getting around that with technology today. Don't do that." I chose not to. Some people have criticized me for that, but that was an artistic design to make a better book for everyone, as opposed to just a few people in a small group.
Dean Carnegie: Interesting. Well, she's not wrong as far as the whole watermark thing. I came across a picture from the Library of Congress of Houdini doing a straitjacket escape in DC, and there's a big chalk mark where Houdini's supposed to be, but actually the chalk mark covers over Houdini.
Charles Greene: Oh, wow.
Dean Carnegie: It's the only image I've ever seen, that particular image, because it's not the one in front of Keith's Theater, it's the other straitjacket escape he did on Pennsylvania Avenue.
Charles Greene: Oh, wow. Okay.
Dean Carnegie: So just on a lark, I was like, "Well, let me just ask AI if you can remove this chalk mark." It did. And it's the clearest image. And I'm like, "Well, that's interesting." I was pleasantly surprised, but at the same time, I thought, "Well, there goes all that watermark stuff that people do, including yourself."
Charles Greene: Right. No, no, it's very true. We, as magicians, collectors, do not realize and have not caught up with what AI is possible, because in a heartbeat, you can remove watermarks. You can change things. You can remove things. You can add things. And literally, it's in a heartbeat, and everyone has this power.
Dean Carnegie: Yeah.
Charles Greene: So we need to make the adjustment for this new technology.
Dean Carnegie: Yeah, and good luck with that.
Charles Greene: And good luck with exactly.
Dean Carnegie: So here's a question, kind of an offbeat question.
Charles Greene: Sure.
Dean Carnegie: So if you had looked at these plates, and they weren't Houdini, let's say they were Thurston, or Blackstone, or Keller, do you think you would have done a book, or what do you think?
Charles Greene: Wow, that's a great... So I think what I would have done, I would have recorded them, especially if they were images that no one had seen. I mean, you take a plane ride out to Ohio, you want to come back with more than a cup of coffee from Roosevelt Coffee in Columbus. So I probably would have taken pictures of them to document them. Being a historian, I probably would have written, you know, maybe a short article, maybe something for PM Squared, maybe something for Genii, or maybe done a talk about them, especially if they'd been images that no one had seen.
Dean Carnegie: Yeah.
Charles Greene: It would have historical value, and really that, sharing that is really the most important thing to me.
Dean Carnegie: Okay, all right. Well, that answers that question. And the book, for the magic world, the book is just a huge bonus, because, you know, normally, the route that would have gone is what you just said. It would have been an article in a magazine, or it might have been a lecture. The fact that you created a whole book out of it is a blessing to the magic community, for sure.
Charles Greene: Well, Gabe asked me, you know, I'm good friends with Gabe, and I was out in Chicago, and he asked me some things about the book. And he said, you know, "Did you have to do a book?" And I thought about it, and I love Gabe, because he asked these really great questions that are really philosophical. "Did you have to do a book?" And I thought, you know, in our world of magic, books are really the most concrete way of holding on to information. You know, we have tons of little pamphlets, you know, Tommy Windsor and Thumbtiffs and this and that, and they get lost and sold and not remembered.
And we could do a video, but those will get lost. But in our world of magic, a book is the most important and the greatest way of holding on to information, literally for decades. So the book was the way to go. And, you know, another thing that some people brought up is, you know, "Well, you must be making a lot of money." Well, you know, no one makes a lot of money from writing a book in magic, because I'm not being funded by Vanishing, Inc. or, you know, other people.
You know, I've got to cut the check. No telling if the book would sell. You know, the magic population is very small and getting smaller all the time. So my thing is, you know, if I can break even just on production, that's my goal. I just want to break even on production. If I can't, you know, that's a good thing. I've given back to the community in some way, and that's all I really want.
Dean Carnegie: Okay. It's ExposingHoudini.com for those of you listening that don't have a copy. So have you broke even?
Charles Greene: I have made my production costs back.
Dean Carnegie: Okay, good, good, good.
Charles Greene: Yes, yes. My wife always tells me, you know, "Your time." I said, "Don't worry about my time. This is just stuff I love." But the designer has been paid, you know, the production, the publication company has been paid. So it's all been good. And we've been able to do some fun things, and I turned back. And because, once again, this is not about making a profit. So I've done things like the Viewfinder. There's an ExposingHoudini poster that I will send to you, of course, because that's hot and new.
This weekend, I'm doing a book reading, which will be the first time that the poster will be in print or given to anyone. It's at the DC Festival of Magic that's run by Brian Curry and with the IBM 50. So it's just something neat to go with the book, because I like those kind of things that go with books.
Dean Carnegie: Yeah, you brought up the Viewmaster. I was just about to ask you about the Viewmaster. So what on Earth possessed you in the 21st century to create a Viewmaster, a clearly, maybe even a 19th-century prop to do that now? I think that's genius. But what made you think of that?
Charles Greene: The thing is that these negatives are, I always get my centuries wrong, are 19th-century items, right? So the last negatives are 19th-century technology. Here we are in the 21st century. I know, growing up, that I used the Viewfinder for looking at things at the World Fair. And I wanted something fun that was like another way of showing these slides, these negatives, these images. There's kind of like bridging the gap of like, you know, there was a time when you had to take these negatives and put them in a stereograph or put them in to have a print made of them, and that's the only way you could have them.
Then we moved on through time and we get the Viewfinder, and that was another way that mostly kids, you know, use these things. And now we are here in the 21st century where we've got this thing that everyone carries around, a phone, and it has more power than the computers that sent the Saturn V to the moon. And here we are just flicking through pictures and scrolling, you know? So it's kind of like a nod to technology and a remembrance of like, it's all technology and it's all going to change.
And at the time, you know, we thought Viewfinders are great. And at this time, we think, oh, these cameras are great, you know, this phone is great. Like when we had the first iPhone, we thought that was great. But we moved on. And in the next 20 years, 20 years, it's only going to get better. So it was just kind of freezing 19th century technology in the 20th century and bringing it to the 21st.
Dean Carnegie: Fascinating. I love that. Well, you mentioned something about the book a minute ago, how concrete the books save everything for time. And this is a topic that I discuss with friends quite often, which is I'm worried that we're in the generation, it's going to be the lost generation as far as magic history. And I say that because if you look back in Houdini's time, Houdini wrote letters. And we have those letters, most of them probably. Right. Right. But I mean, he thousands and thousands and thousands of I have a couple Keller letters in my collection.
So this is we have tons of this stuff that we can go back to and we can say, OK, well, here, here was his thoughts on this. And here's what he thought about that. And he didn't like this guy. And here's why. But now we do everything via email. And I don't care who says that stuff lasts forever. I don't believe it. I have I have and you were probably the same. The early emails we had were AOL.
Charles Greene: Oh, yes.
Dean Carnegie: That company, even in business, it's not the business that used to be. I mean, they were they were in Sterling, Virginia. They had, you know, six giant buildings over there at one time. I was just over there not long ago. There are no AOL buildings over there. So, I mean, that stuff vanishes. And, you know, what are we going to do in this generation when the letters between David Copperfield and somebody or, you know, or their phone calls?
Charles Greene: Right. Right. No, it is all going to match. This is the sad thing that history as we knew it with an ability to hold onto it is vanishing literally because everything's moved to something digital and no one's going to be going through these digital files and hard drives and going to the cloud to find this information. It's quite the loss. And, you know, we get on the phone, we call people and that's not recorded. You know, we send off an email, it's recorded digitally, but no one can get it.
It's not available. It's a whole different world. And, you know, we are very fortunate you and I and other people who are living at this time to have seen those things coming literally from the pen of Houdini, the pen of Heller, the pen of Robert Houdin. They're not going to be able to do that in the next hundred years. You know, it's like I heard someone say that they said this, you know, but I can't read it because it's not in a place where I can see it.
So books are really an important thing because they do seem to last, you know, you think about how many books we still have today and from antiquity, you know, books outside of magic, you know, from the Roman and the French and everyone else that are, you know, thousands of years old, hundreds of years old. They diminish over time, but there are repositories, great repositories of books, where they are stored their terrace and they can be seen. I just want to put in a plug for the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas.
It's a place where I've done some research on Charles de Vere and they're an example, a wonderful example of holding onto material and making it available to people. You know, you go in there, you just ask them whatever you for whatever you're looking for and they will find it to you. They're very much online so you can look it up there. Eric Colleary is just a gem. He's an angel. Before I ever met him in person, I was working on the Ionia book, and during COVID, I said, you know, hey, just through email.
And I didn't know him. I said, I'm looking for this thing, this Charles de Vere business card that you have in your file somewhere. And I didn't know him. And then like a week later, he said, Oh, I wish I could get it for you, but it's all locked down. Two weeks later, he sends me a note saying, Oh, here's the image, use it in a book. I was in the files for a day and I grabbed it for you. You know, it's really that kind of like combination of holding things, the willingness to share that making the connection and the communication with people that you know are seriously interested in our magical history.
Dean Carnegie: So, wow. Well, you bring him up. He's got a book coming out, I guess, any day now.
Charles Greene: It is out. It came out Saturday. I mean, I've seen pictures, we've chatted a little bit about it. He I've seen him signing the books. So his exhibit down in Austin, which runs actually started last Saturday. Just a few days ago, I know this will be time and goes, I think, until January in Austin, Texas. And it's about Houdini's library. The book itself is amazing. If you can get I'm telling everyone, get down to Austin, Texas to see this exhibit like Mystery and Wonder that was at the New York Public Library.
This exhibit that Eric has put together is going to be is it's a gem. It's a gift to magicians. Once it's shut down, it may never ever be together again. So don't miss your chance to see it.
Dean Carnegie: Well, I I knew he had the exhibit. I didn't realize it just opened. I knew it was it was going to open here soon. I will probably make a trek down there because being in Nashville, I'm a little closer than you are in DC. So that's a possibility. Yeah. Back to back to your book. Do you have a favorite image from the book, a favorite glass plate that for whatever reason?
Charles Greene: Sure. Well, there are two of them. So one is I won't give you page numbers, but one is when he's doing the trip from Marseille, France down to Australia and he stops off in Port Said. And he's just there for a couple of nights and there's a picture of him best one of his assistants and they're surrounded by mostly kids in Port Said. And it's an amazing thing because you rarely see Houdini just say kind of in a natural setting like that. And so it's just really on the cuff.
It's a casual shot. He's just surrounded by kids and the kids are probably more fascinated by the camera than they are of Houdini and Bess.
Dean Carnegie: Yeah, they don't. Yeah. Yeah. Who's this guy?
Charles Greene: You know, they're in the middle of the Sinai desert. Well, not the middle, but at the edge. The other favorite thing I have from a work standpoint and a mystery standpoint is there's a picture. I saw the slide and I thought, what is this? It's it's where you just see a bank of a river and on the far side that you just see all of these people gathering at the edge of the river on the bank. And I'm looking at it. I'm working at it. I'm looking and I think, well, this must be from Australia because there are a bunch of pictures when he's in Melbourne doing a river jump at the Queen's Bridge.
It must be from that. And so I go on Facebook. Facebook is great for answers because you just put out a question and people provide you with information. It may not be right, but you'll get a lot of information. So eventually someone says, I don't think it's in Melbourne. I think it's somewhere else. OK, so then I notice in the photograph, there's a tugboat and I look at the name of the tugboat and it says the Hattie Kaleem, or Kalam, but it's on the tugboat. So then I go online and I look up Hattie Kalam and I find out that the boat was registered in Delaware and there are mentions of it in Philadelphia and other places.
And then I start looking for Houdini in Philadelphia and I found out he did a bridge jump off the Market Street Bridge. And then it's like I find articles about this and one of them states he jumped off the Market Street Bridge. There are a bunch of small boats canoes in the water and then he was pulled out by a tugboat Hattie Kalam. For me, that's what I love is when you're doing this kind of research and you find that one little nugget, that one thing that everyone else would overlook and put all the pieces together that make it all real and give it life.
So that's my second favorite one, if not my first. I know it could be a tie.
Dean Carnegie: Okay, well, that's interesting because that brings me to the next question. Oh, yes, is page 161 is the Houdini photo challenge.
Charles Greene: Oh, yes.
Dean Carnegie: Okay, yeah. So, so you've been able to identify all these locations of all these various glass plates that you have. You've got bonus pictures in the book as well that back up the story, but then you have this loan photograph on page 161 of Houdini in an unknown location. So my question is, has anybody since you published the book been able to identify where this picture was taken.
Charles Greene: No one has as of yet now there are a couple of people, there are lots of people who are working on it, and I've gotten some information and this also brings up another issue. So the first one is, there are only three sources for items in the book and they're all identified. Most of the ones that are the original negatives I saw have a black band around them. Yeah, yeah. Now the one on 161 has a black band but it does not come from Ohio. That is an image that is in the McCord Stewart Museum in Montreal, Canada.
I've known Christian Vachon for some time I've been up to the archives up there I've seen the Houdini holdings. And this site is public that this picture is public domain. It's available today on their website in a variety of formats, and you can get a large scale a large file for this photograph so it's available to everyone. So it's public domain. That's the first thing. No one has been able to figure this one out as of yet. It was an artistic decision not to put any reference information about the photograph, but that information is in the beginning of the book because we do credit the McCord Stewart with giving us some things.
What happened, why there's no credit on this is that once people thought that it came from Canada, then a lot of the responses I got to where the photo might be taken centered around Canada. So people say, Oh, it's in Toronto. Oh, it's in Montreal. Oh, it's in Quebec. Well, most likely none of those things are true. So that's why there's no identifying information related to this, this particular image. There is one person who has followed the edge on everyone else, and that is john Cox, because john Cox has just seen so many things he's working on the diaries of Houdini's life.
He think he thinks he might know where it is. And to whoever whoever finds the answer. I'm going to offer them something really really special that's something really special so I'm looking forward to finding out where it is and solving this mystery. But so far, no one has figured out this challenge yet.
Dean Carnegie: Well, I say good luck to everybody that's searching including john, you know, like you said if anybody knows, or who anybody can find it, he would be certainly top of the list for those people. Do you still have copies of exposing Houdini.
Charles Greene: Yes, copies are still available of Exposing Houdini, as my wife says books do not make good furniture. We still have a few copies left they are going quickly, and I'm about to go to the DC festival and we're gonna be selling some books there I'm going to have another book reading that's a public festival for books tonight. I'm going to the NEMCA Northeast magic collections Association in November where I'll be speaking on exposing Houdini. And there are books available and they're available online and actually available at a special price online so that's probably the best way to get them.
And of course that's at ExposingHoudini.com.
Dean Carnegie: Excellent, excellent. Well Charles, thank you for being a guest here on the magic detective podcast and for sharing your insights into these Houdini glass plates and your wonderful book, exposing Houdini and once again, anyone out there that is interesting and picking up a copy it's ExposingHoudini.com. Do you have any final thoughts my friend.
Charles Greene: I will just say that you know we always like extra stuff so if you order directly from ExposingHoudini.com, you'll get some special exposing Houdini stickers, their bookmarks and there's some other things that are only available directly from the site. That's it for fun stuff.
Dean Carnegie: Fantastic. Well once again thank you for being here today being my guest, and best of luck selling the remainder of exposing Houdini.
Charles Greene: Dean, thank you very much. It's really been a great pleasure to share the story and I look forward to seeing you in person as soon as possible.
Dean Carnegie: Sounds good. All right. Thank you so much. Take care Charles. Bye.
And that's going to do it for this episode of the magic detective podcast. If you like this episode, please be sure to like it in whatever way your podcasting provider will allow. Even if you like give me a nice review on Apple podcasts. That would be fantastic. Until next time, I'm Dean Carnegie. I am the magic detective. Please be well and stay safe.
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