Houdini's Library at the Harry Ransom Center Marks 100 Years Since the Escape Artist's Death

Harry Houdini is remembered for chains, water tanks and milk cans, but he spent as much time among books as behind curtains. This Saturday, 31 October, marks 100 years since he died, and an exhibition in Austin, Texas, argues that his library says more about the man than any stunt does.

Houdini's Library is on at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and runs through 24 January 2027, according to The Art Newspaper. It opened on 29 August, the centre's exhibition page says, so the centenary arrives with the show in full swing.

What is on view in Houdini's Library?

The curator, Eric Colleary, spent more than ten years researching how Houdini collected. The Art Newspaper lists the highlights: Reginald Scot's 1584 Discovery of Witchcraft, an exposé of the occult that carries early information on sleight of hand; broadsides advertising Henry "Box" Brown, who escaped slavery by mailing himself in a crate; engravings of mechanical automata; and 18th-century theatrical playbills.

There is also a 1908 poster for the milk can escape, Houdini's copy of the sermons of Bernard de Clairvaux printed in Strasbourg in 1497, and his annotated catalogue of his holdings. In it he turns on Thomas Frost's 1881 The Lives of the Conjurers, calling it a pack of mistakes and wilful errors "from the start to the finish". The Ransom Center's page also lists a first edition of Scot and the handwritten travel diary of the actor David Garrick among the show's treasures.

Why did Houdini collect so many books?

He had little formal schooling and taught himself largely from books. Born Ehrich Weiss in Budapest in 1874, he arrived in the United States in 1878 and grew up in Appleton, Wisconsin, the son of a rabbi, with early memories of his father's theological volumes. He took his stage name from the French magician Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin, and he was an early president of the Society of American Magicians, where he argued that magic deserved to be treated as a serious subject of study.