Ep 118 Dr. Eric Colleary & Houdini's Library

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 Coleri.

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.

Thank you so much for having me.

All right, so we're going to 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?

Yeah, it's a great question, and it's really one of the reasons that I did this book and 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 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, 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 onto 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 sort of in a nutshell.

And then, of course, the act and then a lot of family material, all of that was left to our dean with the understanding that his act would be destroyed for our dean's death.

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 Coleri.

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.

Thank you so much for having me.

All right, so we're going to 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?

Yeah, it's a great question, and it's really one of the reasons that I did this book and 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 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, 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 onto 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 sort of in a nutshell.

And then, of course, the act and then a lot of family material, all of that was left to our dean with the understanding that his act would be destroyed for our dean's death.