I have always loved books.

As a hobbyist magician, however, I have discovered that a magic library differs from an ordinary collection of books. It becomes part workshop, part classroom, part historical archive, and part record of one’s own journey through the art.

When I look at my own shelves, I see more than titles. I see subjects I wanted to learn, magicians whose thinking influenced me, tricks I experimented with, and areas of magic I still hope to explore.

My shelves include substantial working references such as the eight-volume Tarbell Course in Magic, Greater Magic, Expert Card Technique, Mark Wilson’s Complete Course in Magic, Roberto Giobbi’s Card College, Harry Lorayne’s Apocalypse, The Pallbearers Review, several volumes of Jay Sankey material, and books on coin magic, card magic, mentalism, performance, showmanship, and magic history.

Certain books have undoubtedly garnered more attention than others. A number of them are reference works. A few are there because I wanted a specific routine. Others are there because they represent an important piece of magical history.

And the collection keeps growing.

That led me to wonder about the people who took this much further than I ever have.

Who built the great private libraries of magic?

How large did those collections become?

What did they collect?

And, perhaps most importantly, what can those collectors teach someone like me about building a magic library today?

The deeper I looked, the more I realized that some of the most important collections in the history of magic began exactly the same way ours do: one book at a time.

My Library Is a Working Library

Looking at my shelves, I would describe my collection primarily as a working magician’s library.

I can pull books from the shelf when I want to work on cards. Others address coins, mentalism, general magic, stagecraft, presentation, or particular performers.

That is probably how many substantial collections started.

The difference is that some collectors eventually crossed an invisible line. They stopped merely acquiring books they wanted to read and began consciously preserving magic’s literature and history.

They became collectors in the deeper sense of the word.

Their libraries began containing not only books that taught magic but also old magazines, dealer catalogs, correspondence, posters, programs, photographs, manuscripts, pamphlets, and even multiple editions of the same book.

Eventually, some of those collections became historically important in their own right.

Here are several that particularly fascinate me.

Harry Houdini: 3,988 Volumes Bequeathed to the Library of Congress

Harry Houdini may be the most famous magician in history, but the more I learn about him, the more interested I become in Houdini the researcher.

His library was not simply a collection of trick books.

Houdini accumulated material dealing with magic, spiritualism, psychic phenomena, witchcraft, demonology, mediums, hypnosis, escape techniques, and related subjects. He wrote that he had assembled one of the world’s largest libraries on these subjects, with some material dating back centuries. (Library of Congress)

After Houdini’s death, the Library of Congress received 3,988 volumes from his personal collection in 1927. Today, the broader Harry Houdini Collection at the Library of Congress encompasses 10,355 items, including books, pamphlets, periodicals, playbills, prints, scrapbooks, and other ephemera. (Library of Congress)

What strikes me about Houdini is that his library had a purpose.

He used it.

When he investigated spiritualists and mediums, he researched their history and methods. When he wrote, his library supported that work. Books were tools for investigation.

That gives me a useful way of thinking about my collection.

A magic library should not simply fill shelves.

It should help me answer questions.

Explore the Harry Houdini Collection at the Library of Congress

Robert Lund: More Than 12,000 Books

Robert Lund may provide one of the clearest examples of how a personal passion can become something far larger.

Lund was a journalist, magician, and collector who accumulated an extraordinary amount of material related to magic. His private collection eventually became the foundation of the American Museum of Magic in Marshall, Michigan, which he and his wife, Elaine, founded in 1978. (American Museum of Magic)

Today the collection includes over 12,000 books, approximately 3,000 posters, 20,000 photographs, letters, diaries, scrapbooks, periodicals, apparatus, costumes, and roughly 350,000 pieces of ephemera. (American Museum of Magic)

Twelve thousand books.

That number alone is impressive, but I think the more important lesson is what Lund collected besides books.

A poster tells me how a magician presented himself to an audience.

A program tells me who appeared on a particular bill.

A letter may explain how one magician really felt about another.

A dealer catalog displays which tricks the dealer sold, their costs, and their descriptions.

A photograph captures something a written description cannot.

Lund reminds me that eventually a serious magic library can become something more accurately described as a magic archive.

Explore the American Museum of Magic Archives and Library

Milbourne Christopher: More Than 4,000 Books, Catalogs, and Magazines

Milbourne Christopher is interesting to me because he did something every serious collector should consider:

He documented his library.

Christopher was a magician, author, historian, and researcher who accumulated an exceptional collection of literature concerning magic, mind reading, psychic research, spiritualism, and the occult.

Maurine Christopher and George Hansen spent years cataloging that collection. Their work ultimately documented over 4,000 books, catalogs, and magazines. (Mike Caveney’s Magic Words)

The first volume of The Milbourne Christopher Library alone documents over 1,100 titles dating from 1589 through 1900. A second volume covers material published from 1901 through 1996. (Mike Caveney’s Magic Words)

That fascinates me almost as much as the collection itself.

Christopher didn’t merely leave behind shelves full of books. Because he cataloged the collection, researchers can reconstruct what it contained.

That is an important distinction.

A thousand uncataloged books are a personal possession.

A thousand cataloged books are becoming a research resource.

It has made me think differently about my own shelves. At some point, I should know exactly what I own, including author, title, edition, publication date, subject, and perhaps even where and when I acquired it.

Otherwise, one day I may buy something I already have.

I suspect more than a few magicians know that experience.

See The Milbourne Christopher Library bibliography

John Mulholland: About 10,000 Volumes in 20 Languages

John Mulholland deserves a prominent place on any list of great magic bibliophiles.

Mulholland was a magician, author, historian, and longtime editor of The Sphinx. He was also an exceptionally serious collector.

His library eventually reached approximately 10,000 volumes in 20 languages. (PBS)

That number becomes even more remarkable when one considers how difficult collecting was before online booksellers and internet searches.

There was no instant worldwide search.

Collectors cultivated relationships with dealers, haunted used bookstores, studied catalogs, corresponded with other collectors, and sometimes spent years trying to locate a particular title.

The curators later transferred Mulholland’s collection to The Players Club in New York. Following his death, individuals worked to preserve the collection intact instead of dispersing it. Ricky Jay would later become involved with the collection and its cataloging. (PBS)

The idea of 10,000 volumes in 20 languages also makes an important point: serious magic bibliography quickly becomes international.

One cannot fully understand the history of conjuring solely through English-language literature.

Jay Marshall: Nearly 250,000 Books

Jay Marshall’s library is almost difficult to comprehend.

At the time of his death, estimates placed his entire personal library at nearly 250,000 volumes. (Chicago Magazine)

Not all of those were magic books.

Marshall collected voraciously across an extraordinary range of subjects, including puppetry, humor, gambling, crime, mathematics, toys, games, scouting, popular entertainment, and, of course, magic.

But within that enormous personal library was what one observer described as one of the finer private libraries of conjuring literature. It contained Houdini material, rare antiquarian magic books, and even a first edition of Reginald Scot’s 1584 The Discoverie of Witchcraft. (Chicago Magazine)

Marshall appeals to me because his library reflects something I believe strongly about learning:

Sometimes the most interesting ideas come from subjects adjacent to the one we are studying.

For a magician, that might mean books about theater, psychology, comedy, storytelling, circus history, deception, gambling, memory, acting, design, or even technology.

My magic library doesn’t have to contain only books labeled “magic.”

A book about storytelling might improve a routine more than another collection of tricks.

A book on theater might improve staging.

A book on psychology might improve audience management.

Marshall’s library reminds me that intellectual curiosity does not need rigid boundaries.

Read about Jay Marshall’s extraordinary library

H. Adrian Smith: One of the Great Private Magic Libraries

H. Adrian Smith is especially interesting to me because his collection is now housed at Brown University’s John Hay Library in Providence.

Smith graduated from Brown in 1930 and helped pay his way through college by performing magic. Over his lifetime, he became deeply involved in magic organizations and accumulated what Brown describes as one of the finest private libraries devoted to conjuring and magic. (Brown University Library)

The collection includes books dating to the sixteenth century on subjects such as natural magic, alchemy, astrology, witchcraft, and religious rites, along with later holdings in conjuring, card tricks, games, performers, magic periodicals, posters, ephemera, and objects. (Brown University Library)

Here I have to make an important distinction about numbers.

Brown does not provide a reliable public total for the number of books in the collection on its current collection description. Instead of creating a figure, I would simply describe it as an extensive collection with fully cataloged print holdings.

That actually illustrates an important problem with comparing great magic libraries. Some institutions count books. Some count titles. Some count volumes. Some count objects. Others report linear feet, boxes, or total archival items.

So you can’t compare every collection with a single number.

Still, the Smith Collection appeals to me because it is close enough to become a genuine research destination rather than something I only read about.

Explore the H. Adrian Smith Collection at Brown University

John H. Percival: More Than 1,200 Volumes

Another significant magic library in Providence is one I find interesting.

The John H. Percival Magic Collection is held by the Providence Public Library.

Percival was an amateur magician and collector from East Providence. His book collection contains over 1,200 volumes on magic tricks, ventriloquism, spiritualism, stage entertainment, gambling, and related subjects. (Providence Public Library)

It also contains periodicals, manuscripts, newspaper clippings, autographs, promotional material, typescripts, photographs, and ephemera.

One of Percival’s notable books was Will Goldston’s Exclusive Magical Secrets, the famous locked book. According to the library’s description, Percival spent two years locating a copy. (Providence Public Library)

Today I can type the title of a magic book into a search engine and sometimes find multiple copies in minutes.

Collectors such as Percival sometimes searched for years.

That changes the nature of collecting.

It also makes me appreciate why finding a long-sought volume could become a memorable event in a collector’s life.

Explore the John H. Percival Magic Collection

John J. McManus and Morris N. Young: More Than 20,000 Items

John J. McManus and Morris N. Young, together with their wives Hanna McManus and Chesley Young, assembled another extraordinary magic collection.

Together they accumulated more than 20,000 items, which they jointly presented to the Library of Congress in 1955. (Finding Aids)

This is another case where people should not misunderstand “20,000 items” as 20,000 books.

The collection contains thousands of pamphlets, offprints, clippings, and other forms of ephemeral literature covering conjuring, ventriloquism, fortune-telling, spiritualism, gambling, hypnotism, automata, mind reading, and similar subjects. The description states that the clipping component alone contains roughly 17,000 items. (Finding Aids)

I think this collection offers one of the most important lessons for my library.

Do not underestimate the small stuff.

A lecture booklet may survive in only a handful of copies.

A dealer’s instruction sheet might contain the only documentation of a particular trick.

A convention program may establish that a magician performed at a specific place on a specific date.

An old magic catalog may tell us when an effect first appeared commercially.

Hardcover books look important.

Ephemera often doesn’t.

History does not care what looked important at the time.

Explore the McManus-Young Collection at the Library of Congress

Ricky Jay: Several Thousand Volumes

Ricky Jay may be the collector whose philosophy interests me most.

Jay was not simply an extraordinary sleight-of-hand artist. He was a serious scholar of unusual entertainment, deception, gambling, sideshows, circus history, automatons, con men, remarkable performers, and obscure corners of popular culture.

A profile of Jay described his private collection as containing several thousand volumes, together with hundreds of lithographs, playbills, pamphlets, broadsides, and other ephemera. (PBS)

No one seems to have fixed the exact number of books publicly , so describing it as “several thousand volumes” is the most responsible approach.

Jay spent more than half a century assembling the broader collection. When Sotheby’s offered a major portion of it in 2021, the sale alone contained 633 lots, including books, pamphlets, posters, handbills, manuscripts, prints, and other material reaching back to the sixteenth century. (Sothebys.com)

What I admire about Jay is that his collection became fuel for his scholarship.

He did not simply possess strange, old material.

He researched it.

He wrote about it.

He drew connections between forgotten performers, strange advertisements, unusual feats, deception, entertainment, and cultural history.

That is an aspiration worth borrowing.

Instead of asking only:

What books do I own?

I could also ask:

What could I discover because I own them?

Explore Sotheby’s overview of the Ricky Jay Collection

David Copperfield: More Than 150,000 Magic Artifacts and Historical Items

David Copperfield’s International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts is difficult to compare directly with a conventional private library because it encompasses far more than books.

Guinness World Records documented the collection at more than 150,000 props, books, posters, and pieces of historical ephemera as early as 2005, identifying it as the largest private collection of magic artifacts. (Guinness World Records)

The collection incorporates material from earlier collectors and contains significant Houdini artifacts, historic apparatus, rare books, posters, and archival material.

Unfortunately, the Guinness figure is a combined collection count. I haven’t found a reliable current public source that separates the number of books alone, so I wouldn’t assign an unsupported book count to Copperfield’s library.

Copperfield represents the logical endpoint of the process I see beginning on my own shelves.

A personal collection can become a library.

A library can become an archive.

An archive can become a museum.

See the Guinness World Records description of Copperfield’s collection

Putting the Numbers in Perspective

The numbers themselves tell an interesting story:

Collector	Documented size
Harry Houdini	3,988 volumes donated to Library of Congress
Robert Lund	12,000+ books
Milbourne Christopher	4,000+ books, catalogs, and magazines
John Mulholland	~10,000 volumes
Jay Marshall	~250,000 total books, only part of which were magic
H. Adrian Smith	No reliable public book total located
John H. Percival	1,200+ volumes
McManus and Young	20,000+ total items, not all books
Ricky Jay	Several thousand volumes
David Copperfield	150,000+ total artifacts/items, books not separately counted

A major modern institutional comparison: New York’s Conjuring Arts Research Center reports a library of more than 12,000 volumes devoted to magic and allied arts, including more than 1,000 pre-1900 volumes and over 500 printed before 1700. (Conjuring Arts)

Explore the Conjuring Arts Research Center library

What These Collections Are Teaching Me About My Own

Studying these collectors has changed the way I look at my own bookshelves.

At first glance, I see Tarbell.

I see Greater Magic.

I see Card College.

I see Lorayne.

Sankey.

Mark Wilson.

Expert Card Technique.

Books on coins, cards, mentalism, showmanship, and individual performers.

But increasingly, I see something else.

I see the beginnings of a record of what interested me as a magician.

That means I may want to think more deliberately about what comes next.

I Want More Than Trick Books

The great libraries convince me that a mature magic collection should have several layers.

The first is the working library: books I actually use to learn tricks, techniques, routines, theory, and presentation.

I already have a good start there.

The second is periodical literature.

Magazines such as Genii, The Linking Ring, M-U-M, The Sphinx, The Jinx, The Magic Circular, and others capture magic as it was developing. They preserve conversations, advertisements, controversies, reviews, tricks, obituaries, and news that may never appear in a conventional book.

The third layer is history and biography.

Learning what magicians perform is useful.

Learning why they mattered is even more interesting.

The fourth is ephemera.

• Programs.
• Dealer catalogs.
• Convention booklets.
• Lecture notes.
• Advertising.
• Instruction sheets.
• Photographs.
• Correspondence.

These are precisely the things that frequently get thrown away.

They may eventually become some of the most historically interesting items in a collection.

Finally, there are primary sources.

• Signed books.
• Annotated books.
• Letters.
• Manuscripts.
• Personal notebooks.
• Scrapbooks.
• Original photographs.

These items connect a collection directly to the people who created the history.

I Also Need to Catalog What I Have

Christopher’s library especially persuaded me of this.

At some point, simply putting another book on a shelf is not enough.

I should know what I own.

At a minimum, I would like to maintain:

Title • Author • Publication year • Edition • Publisher • Subject • Format • Location • Acquisition source • Acquisition date • Purchase price • Signed/inscribed status • Notes

I could also tag books by subjects such as:

Cards, coins, mentalism, general magic, close-up, stage magic, parlor, history, biography, theory, performance, children’s magic, apparatus, collecting, and bibliography.

A digital catalog does something else valuable.

It turns the shelves into a searchable research database.

I can ask:

What books do I have on the Endless Chain?

Which books discuss Six-Card Repeat?

What material do I own concerning showmanship?

Which books mention a particular magician?

That transforms the library from storage into a tool.

Perhaps the Most Important Question: What Happens to the Library Eventually?

Collectors can also easily avoid a question.

What happens to all of this someday?

The history of magic collecting contains plenty of examples of remarkable libraries being scattered after their owners died.

Sometimes that is beneficial. Rare books return to the collecting community.

However, important relationships sometimes slip away.

A library assembled over fifty years may reveal something about the collector, the art’s development, or the connections between books. Once someone sells everything one item at a time, that context disappears.

Robert Lund planned for preservation.

Houdini made a bequest.

H. Adrian Smith gave his collection to Brown University .

Percival’s material went to the Providence Public Library.

McManus and Young placed their holdings with the Library of Congress.

That is something I had not really considered when I started putting magic books on shelves.

A collector eventually becomes a curator.

And a curator eventually needs to think about stewardship.

My Library May Be Small, but It Is Mine

My collection is nowhere near Houdini’s 3,988-volume bequest.

It certainly isn’t Robert Lund’s 12,000 books.

And unless something goes seriously wrong with my book-buying habits, I don’t expect to challenge Jay Marshall’s quarter-million-volume library.

But I no longer think those numbers are the most important part of the story.

The real question is whether people use, understand, document, and appreciate a library.

A hundred carefully chosen books that influence my magic may matter more to me than a thousand books I never open.

Studying these great collectors makes me want to broaden what I save.

Not just methods.

History.

Not just books.

Ephemera.

Not just famous magicians.

Local magicians.

Not just published material.

Stories.

Photographs.

Programs.

Letters.

Records of the community around the art.

Because ultimately a magic library is not really about books.

It is about preserving knowledge.

Every book on my shelves represents someone trying to pass something along: a method, an idea, a routine, a theory, an experience, or a piece of history.

And every time I add a book, save an old program, keep a lecture note, or preserve a piece of magic history rather than throwing it away, I become a small link in that same chain.

Houdini did it.

Christopher did it.

Lund did it.

Mulholland did it.

Marshall did it.

Smith, Percival, Jay, McManus, and Young did it.

Their collections became extraordinary because they kept looking, learning, collecting, and preserving.

Mine is still growing.

And after learning more about theirs, I think I am understanding what I want mine to become.