Escaping Obscurity - The Travel Diary of Harry Houdini, 1897-1899 (Regular Edition)

After two long years of work, I am pleased to announce the release of Escaping Obscurity - The Travel Diary of Harry Houdini, 1897-1899. Yes, there are scores of books on the life of Houdini but I can assure you that none of them tell this amazing story. The journal begins with 24-year-old Harry presenting a standard magic act in dime museums, circuses, small-time vaudeville, and spiritualist chambers. He and Bess are barely eeking out a living. Each of their tiny successes and all of their dramatic failures were dutifully recorded in a small travel diary. The end of this hard-scrabble story reads like a movie script. Houdini received a telegram from Martin Beck, the head of the Orpheum vaudeville circuit, telling him to drop the magic tricks and concentrate on his escapes. Houdini took Beck’s advice and one year later he was a bonafide superstar on both sides of the Atlantic. Escaping Obscurity reproduces Beck’s telegram that changed the course of Houdini’s career and the magic world at large.

Three things made me want to publish this nearly illegible diary. First, the great Houdini historian, John Cox, agreed to decipher and then annotate the text found on each and every page. Second, my friends in the magic collecting world stepped up with an unbelievable array of suitable photographs, many of which have never appeared in print. And lastly, my old friend and graphic designer extraordinaire, Michael Albright, agreed to assemble this complicated jig-saw puzzle into a beautiful, full-color book of 373 pages measuring 9 by 12 inches. The final result is nothing sort of breathtaking. The price for the regular edition is $125. We will pay the postage on all domestic orders. Click through the photos to see the front and back cover as well as some spreads from inside the book.