On occasion, Houdini managed to purchase collections once owned by his rivals.

While on tour all over the world, Houdini spent every moment of available free time deep in library study, interviewing retired magicians and collectors, and hunting in antique book shops, even going so far as to place want-ads seeking various magic materials of interest. “ accumulated one of the largest libraries in the world on psychic phenomena, spiritualism, magic, witchcraft, demonology, evil spirits, etc.,” Houdini himself wrote in 1924, “ some of the material going back as far as 1489.” ( A Magician Among the Spirits) Though the real meat of his library are a vast number of works on spiritualism dating from the 19th and 20th centuries, the collection also includes a variety of magic-related books inscribed by well-known magicians. Throughout his career, Harry Houdini amassed a jaw-dropping collection of antique books on magic, spiritualism and other mystical topics.

“The love of bibliographic research has been the cornerstone of my life from my earliest years,” Houdini once told the Club of Odd Volumes, Harry Houdini, an antique magic bibliophile In addition to his psychic research and theatrical performances, Houdini spent a lifetime collecting rare and unusual books on his most obsessive topics. Though his feats and escapes were known the world over in his day, in later years Harry Houdini devoted himself to the world of mediums and spiritualists – first in an effort to find out if there was truth to the dark art, and later, to debunk and expose fraudulent scammers. The most legendary magician and escape artist of all time, whose mysterious illusions and escapes made him a household name still revered today, died on Halloween in 1926.

Magic of houdini