Astrology & Magic

Harry Houdini took his stage name from a Frenchman. Born Erik Weisz in Budapest in 1874 and raised in Wisconsin and New York, he named himself after Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, a French watchmaker who had turned stage magic into an elegant theatrical art in the mid-1800s.

Houdini began as a card magician and a dime museum act and found fame as an escape artist. He got out of handcuffs, straitjackets, locked trunks, jail cells and milk cans filled with water, often in front of huge crowds, and he made sure the newspapers were there. In later years he spent much of his energy exposing fake spirit mediums, who were enjoying a boom after World War I. He died on Halloween in 1926. The Library of Congress holds a large collection of magic books and material, including much connected with Houdini.

He was part of a golden age of stage magic. From the 1880s to the 1920s, magicians like Harry Kellar and Howard Thurston toured the country with large shows full of illusions, levitations and disappearing assistants. They advertised with big color lithographed posters, showing the magician with devils and imps whispering in his ear. Those posters are among the most striking show printing of the era.

Astrology is the older half of this subject. The signs of the zodiac appear in prints going back centuries, and in early America they were part of everyday life through the almanac. Many farmers' almanacs printed a figure of a man surrounded by the 12 signs, each linked to a part of the body, and readers used it to choose days for planting, bleeding or weaning. Zodiac imagery later moved into fortune telling cards, advertising and decoration.

Worth noticing in the magic posters is how they sell mystery without explaining anything. The magician floats a woman in the air or stands among spirits, but the poster never hints at how it is done. Look at the eyes too. Magicians were nearly always drawn staring straight out at the viewer, as though the trick had already started.