Houdini Hits Los Angeles

The Houdini: Art and Magic exhibit opens this weekend at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles!

Wild About Harry's John Cox was fortunate enough to attend a preview last week and files this report - Click Here To Read About Houdini: Art and Magic in Los Angeles.

Dover Magic Books - Classic Reprints

Dover Publications has a long history of reprinting public domain (copyright free) books and graphics, and they've made quite a few hard to find magic texts available over the years.

CLICK HERE to see their current listing for magic (and related) books, which includes volumes by Walter B. Gibson, T. Nelson Downs, Houdini, Jasper Maskelyne, Henning Nelms and other classic magicians.

If you act quickly, they're even having a spring sale on many books, but hurry - it ends tomorrow, Thursday the 21st.

A Magician's Best Friend - Lafayette and Beauty

Dean Carnegie's newest post over at The Magic Detective blog is a great story about a man and his dog... The Great Lafayette and Beauty, to be precise. Sadly, it ends tragically, but they wind up together in the end. Click here to read the post at Carnegie: Magic Detective.

The Great Simpsina - Homer vs. Houdini!

Ok, Homer vs. Houdini MAY be a bit of an exaggeration - in fact, nothing of the kind takes place in this special magic-related episode of The Simpsons. Actually, Lisa is the Simpson who takes up the conjuring arts in the episode, which aired last Sunday. Guest voices include the great Martin Landau, David Copperfield, Ricky Jay, and Penn & Teller. Watch the episode in its entirety here or at Hulu.com.

Heroes of Magic - Blackstone, Cardini, & Pollock

Here's a clip from the 2000 UK TV Documentary, "Heroes of Magic," featuring performance footage of Harry Blackstone, Sr., Cardini, and Channing Pollock. Commentators include Ali Bongo and Max Maven, among others.



The Cardini footage is especially cool to me, he had such a smooth sense of comedy that served him well. For more on Cardini, take a look at his official website by CLICKING HERE. The link on that website to the book Cardini: The Suave Deceiver is outdated; CLICK HERE to go to the page for it at The Miracle Factory.

I'll be sharing more clips from the documentary over the next week or so, stay tuned!

Secrets of Houdini?

Yahoo has posted a new video professing to reveal the "Secrets of Houdini's Magic!"
The producers really delved deeply to come up with the hard-hitting journalistic work seen below. And then they saw a squirrel and ran off topic for a bit.

Dorothy Young Remembers Houdini

Via the always excellent Wild About Harry blog, here's an interview with recently deceased Houdini assistant Dorothy Young about her days with Harry.

Houdini and his roadshow girls. Young is second from the right.