Another Book For Your Collection

Just in case the last book I featured wasn't expensive enough, here's a first edition from 1747 for about ten grand. The guy who's selling it on eBay calls his business "Joe's Easy Sales". Happy bidding!

John Calvert At The OMC! I Waited Ten Years For This.

The OMC was extremely proud to present John and Tammy Calvert as our January lecture. I saw them lecture at the OMC ten years ago, and it was at that event that I filled out an application to join the OMC.

The Calverts have been touring the world for decades. As a matter of fact, for longer than any other magic act in history, according to John. It was a pleasure to see them perform and an honor to chat with them before and after their performance.

The Calverts perform with grace and style. They are the definition of class.

In the first picture he poses with a piece of machinery that he's been using for over fifty years. It was used for his final effect, where he decapitated a member of the audience (unfortunately I don't have any pictures of this because I was helping him with it). Right after I took this picture I told him that he looks like Vincent Price. I think it's something about his smile.

He started out with his famous cigarette manipulation routine, where he reaches up into the air and cigarettes appear at his fingertips. He explained that he used to do this with lit cigarettes, but he doesn't anymore for moral reasons, since he is strongly against smoking. Next was his rendition of the spirit cabinet, which caused a sensation when it was first performed by the Davenport brothers over 100 years ago. An audience member (in this case, OMC member Michael Della Pena) was tied up and a giant box was assembled to hide him from the audience. Then pieces of rope and misc. items were seen flying out of the top of the box with no apparent explanation. When the box was disassembled he is seen to be still tied up, and with his shirt off. For his next effect, he tied up OMC member Fred Casto and without telling Fred what to do, he managed to escape! Next was Seeing With The Fingertips. His eyes were taped shut by a few audience volunteers, and he walked among the audience asking people to hold up misc. items. He identified them all. And his Dancing Hankerchief was beautiful and mysterious, with a touch of humor. He asked for a hankerchief from an audience member, placed it on a table and it started moving and levitating with a personality all it's own.

By the way, his performance was covered by the Oakland Tribune. They wrote an article and shot a video of them performing (which I am in). Assuming the the story is still on their site, you can see it by clicking here.

Rare Houdini book On Ebay!

I just found this item on ebay. It's a first edition of "Magician Among The Spirits" by Houdini. I have a few editions of this book, including one published by Richard Kaufman, which is a reproduction of the book exactly as it was written by Houdini--before the publisher took a lot of material out to shorten it. But if you get ahold of the first edition then you'll be the envy of all your magician friends (including me).

By the way, you may (or may not) have noticed that this is the first time I have ever written anything on my blog. Up until now I've just been uploading photographs without writing anything about them. I think I've been doing this because most of the people who come here are OMC member who already know about the people I'm photographing (or it could be laziness). But from now on I'll try to make some comments about the people and events I'm taking pictures of. I might even make the pictures a little bigger. And since I'm putting all of this work into my blog, maybe you can give some feedback about what you see here!