Magic Posters and Ephemera
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Sword Swallowers and Shrunken Heads: An Ode to Johnny Fox and His Freakatorium
By Rebecca Rego Barry — Walking home down Clinton Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side one day in 1999, writer and filmmaker Laurie Gwen Shapiro encountered a tall, dark, and handsome man on the sidewalk swallowing fire. "Wow!", Shapiro exclaimed, "Who are you?" It was beloved sword-swallower, magician, and collector Johnny Fox. After Shapiro and Fox chatted for a bit, he invited her into his museum. Shapiro looked at the brightly colored storefront behind him called the Freakatorium: El Museo Loco, and then back...
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Hoarders, Hauntings, and Two-Headed Cows: Dealing Dead People's Things
By Ben Marks — As a child, Duane Scott Cerny didn’t exactly dream of growing up to become one of Chicago’s premier antiques dealers, but his early entrepreneurial instincts should have been a clue that one day he would. His eyes were opened to the world of resale on an unlikely day, November 22, 1963, at the tender age of 4, when the assassination of President Kennedy interrupted Cerny’s lunchtime ritual of watching “Bozo’s Circus” on TV. What, young Cerny wondered, could possibly be more important than...
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The Magician Who Astounded the World by Conjuring Spirits and Talking with Mummies
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — Quick: Name the world’s greatest magician, a man who became famous by sawing women in half, making cards rise unassisted from their decks, pulling rabbits from audience member’s coats, and levitating assistants far above the stage. Harry Houdini? David Blaine? "This pleasure comes from being deceived, and knowing you're being deceived in an artful way.” You probably didn’t say Howard Thurston, the sensational performer whose name was synonymous with stage magic a century ago. In...
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Dark Art: Spectacular Illusions from the Golden Age of Magic
By Hunter Oatman-Stanford — At the height of the live-magic era, seeing was believing. On a nightly basis, heads were severed and reattached, horses levitated from the stage, and bullets were caught in mid-air. To advertise these impossible feats, magicians at the turn of the 20th century commissioned vividly illustrated posters, emblazoned with exotic-sounding names and ominously scowling faces, daring you to doubt them. More than 100 years later, these posters still provoke an insatiable desire to see these illusions...
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David Lance Goines Discusses Perfect Poster Design
By Maribeth Keane — I don’t collect posters. I don’t collect anything. I started making posters one at a time by hand in high school just for specific events, basically got going when I was a freshman. I still make them today, but they’re printed on a printing press now. I’ve made 221 posters, not including the ones I did in high school. Fundamentally, I believe that in order to be effective as opposed to artsy and not really effective at all, a poster has to be extremely simple. The Shepard Fairey posters...
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Collecting Vintage Magic Posters
By Charles Greene III — What are vintage magic posters? Posters of magicians printed by the stone lithography method qualify as vintage magic posters. The stone lithography process was in it highest use during magic's golden age, 1890 - 1930. This time saw the great masters of magic - Herrmann, Kellar, Carter the Great, Thurston, and Houdini. Lithography was invented in Munich in 1798 by Aloys Senefelder. However, it is Jules Cheret who mastered the technique of stone lithography in the 1870's and is...