Seven Habits of Highly Effective Magicians: Marketing Lessons (and Lots of Handcuffs) from the Era of Houdini

Collection of Ken Trombly, Bethesda, Maryland. Photo by Dean A. Beasom.

You wouldn't think, in an era before movies, TV, or even radio, that it would take much convincing to get people to a magic show. Even the cups and balls routine must have been a thrilling alternative to singing in rounds or the regular Friday night hay ride. But as two exhibits currently at the Skirball Center attest, the seductive pull of the couch (or rocking chair?) is strong, and a bit of shamelessly sensational advertising never hurts.

"Houdini: Art and Magic" and "Masters of Illusion: Jewish Magicians of the Golden Age" each have over 150 posters, props, film clips and costumes from magic's heyday. The posters especially show how the growing middle class -- those drudges again! -- turned towards the exotic and stupendous to escape the "Time to Make the Widgets" grind.

Here are seven of our favorite techniques for getting your lazy, early 20th century ass down to that magic show.

7. The Kitchen Sink

Collection of Mike Caveney's Egyptian Hall Museum

If you're planning on rolling into town with The Decapitation Act, The Spirit Cabinet, The Hunchback Quadrille, a ventriloquist, an uber-flexible brother/brother/sister dance squad, the musically-possessed Onofri Brothers and the perennial favorite "Drop the Handkerchief Right Into the Audience" routine, you might as well just use it all. Work day over!

6. Interactive Marketing

Library of Congress, Rare Book and Special Collections

As many a Twitter campaign or annoying Hulu ad is currently trying to prove, we looooove being part of what's being sold to us. Houdini was all over that game, offering cash money to anyone who could slap a pair of handcuffs on him that he couldn't get off. The public never did manage to come with manacles he couldn't defeat, and the Skirball has a selection of some of the surprisingly varied and unique cuffs on display. (What kind of culture needs 50 variations on the handcuff? You tell me, Victorian America.)

But don't forget that interactive marketing can have its pitfalls: for decades Houdini, in tip-top shape in the years when Grover Cleveland was considered an eligible bachelor, had an open challenge that he could take any punch to the gut. In 1926, one enthusiastic lug took the swing before the magician had a chance to prepare himself, rupturing Houdini's appendix. He died seven days later.

This poster also has some other good pointers, liberal use of bold type chief among them. Put those CTRL+B fingers to work! After sprinkling the poster with typeface emphasis, turn-of-the-century advertisers went for the similarly flat-out strategy of just writing "IMPORTANT" really big at the top, and followed all that up with the not-quite-flashy promise from Houdini that "I do not slip my hands." Cheap thrill and a half!

5. Visual Excitement

Collection of Ken Trombly, Bethesda, Maryland. Photo by Dean A. Beasom

But even the most grandiose Victorian verbal stylings and typesetting couldn't match the image's power for describing the increasingly elaborate tricks Houdini and his contemporaries were devising. In the same year as that IMPORTANT poster, Houdini splashed out on a two-tone lithograph that attempted to convey the instantaneous surprise of the Houdini's famous "Metamorphosis" act. Yeah, I know it looks like they're just standing there, but in the first picture he's in the sack, and in the second one she is, you feel me? As curator Brooke Kamin Rapaport notes, "a text explaining the performance takes longer to read than the three seconds the 'Metamorphosis' takes to complete." Boom. Sell out show.

4. Exotic Escape

Collection of Mike Caveney's Egyptian Hall Museum

Chromolithography, or color printing, came along just as magicians were expanding what it meant to be novel and awe-inspiring. Skirball curator Erin Clancey explains that as railroads, steamships and automobiles began to take traveling magicians to increasingly distant and obscure destinations, "magicians became interpreters of world culture for the general public, and their acts and personas often reflected this role."

The Great Ramses (a.k.a. Albert Marchinsky) was savvy to what a dash of the timeless supernatural could do for box office. Theo and David Bamberg, the sixth and seventh generation members of the Bamberg Magical Dynasty (I'm not even going to deal with the extraordinary coolness of that phrase) were more hep to the "crudely interpreted racial exoticism" game, and their out-and-out yellowface personas Okito and Fu Manchu endured in popularity from the late 1800's (Okito) all the way to the 1960's (Fu Manchu).