History Made Magic: The Scrapbooks of Harry Houdini Come Alive..
Not Even Past, a very creative blog, the Harry Ransom Center at the Univ. of Texas-Austin, and Charles Binkow, bring us the scrapbooks of Harry Houdini. Look for the links that will open the scrapbooks in a flipbook style and permit you to view each page as if you are actually holding the book…
In a new age of digital powered skepticism, where anything “extraordinary” can be explained within seconds on a smartphone, there isn’t much room for magic. But the Harry Ransom Center at UTAustin has brought us back to a time when the mystical unknown captured the hearts and minds of people everywhere. The HRC acquired the scrapbooks of legendary magician Harry Houdini (1891-1926) in 1958 and has recently digitized its collection for the public. The collection contains ten scrapbooks filled with advertisements, newspaper clippings, pamphlets, reports, how-to articles, and almost everything else regarding magic from roughly the 1830s through the 1920s. Houdini owned all the books at the time of his death, but he did not compile all of the clippings.
