Printed by Adolf Frielander, Hamburg.
Catalogue Items
Dante showcard for the film A-Haunting We Will Go from Twentieth Century-Fox. This was a feature film starring Laurel and Hardy.
Dante showcard for the film A-Haunting We Will Go from Twentieth Century-Fox. This was a feature film starring Laurel and Hardy.
This interesting letter from William Minns to Herbert J. Collings details arrangements for The Magic Circle show that King George V had requested at Windsor Castle on 25 April 1928. As a result of the decisions the Circle made about who should perform in the show, some professional members of The Magic Circle resigned. They believed that the Circle should have included more professionals in the show, rather than amateur magicians, however good the amateurs might be. Lewis Davenport was one of the professionals who resigned.
On this occasion the Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to the Davenport Family.
In 1922, by which time Devant was too ill to perform, he chose Claude Chandler to present his Revue of Magic at St. George’s Hall in London. At the time, Chandler was in his mid-twenties. Over a hundred years later, detailed records of the project still exist. Our article is based on this Devant-Chandler archive and we have taken the opportunity to reproduce many of the original documents. They are a time capsule from the 1920s.
Devant and Chandler hoped that the revue would also be booked for variety theatres, but it was not to be. We also discuss the reasons for this lack of success in the PDF.
Magicians P.T. Selbit, Owen Clark and Paul Vandy travelled up to Histon, Cambridge to be part of the annual Chivers & Sons Ltd. entertainment which, in 1923, celebrated 50 years of preserve production. This smart six page booklet is headed Programme & Words of Annual Entertainment. It is dated 20 and 21 December 1923. Selbit had two spots, one of which was presenting the séance The Long Acre Ghost which had so impressed Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. View the PDF to see all six pages. We include illustrations of this programme courtesy of the Histon and Impington Village Society. The history of Chivers & Sons is interesting. Details may be found in the profusely illustrated book The Chivers Story published in 2023 by the Histon and Impington Village Society.
David Berglas (1926-2023) became very popular with his billing ‘International Man of Mystery’.
Many people may know the name Donald Stevenson because he was an engineer who worked with Chung Ling Soo. He is mentioned in Will Dexter’s book The Riddle of Chung Ling Soo. Fewer people realise that Stevenson used the name Martin Mayhew for his magic. I’m grateful to Michael Colley for pointing this out to me, and supplying background information on Stevenson, who was also well known in the emerging world of model aeroplanes.
This Australasian tour covered Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. The show visited the Opera House in Wellington, New Zealand from 25 November to 19 December 1908. The details of the bill are spread out across the pages, forcing the theatre goers to at least look at all the advertisements throughout the programme. The Director of Illusions was Owen Clark. The PDF contains images of all of the pages.
Owen Clark was a prolific inventor. However. it is not always clear when he claimed an invention whether he was referring to a basic principle, or a new presentation, or improvement to an existing principle.
After a successful stage career performing in many parts of the world, Clark developed a new act with gigantic illusions using the name Owen. This brochure shows drawings of many of these illusions and it is well worth looking at it in detail. The brochure says the act required ten assistants and six tons of apparatus. Although this may be somewhat exaggerated, there is no doubt that it was an expensive act to tour and the financial state of variety theatres meant that the act was too expensive to book. It was a bold experiment but a financial failure.