This is from a Private Estate in Good Condition. This is a hardcover book with the original dust jacket. The dust jacket's outer edges have a few tears, especially near the top and bottom of the spine area. The inside flap of the dust jacket has been folded and the front flap has a corner missing from it. The hardcover book itself is in like new condition.
Copyright 1977
Houdini is a name synonymous with enchantment and wonder, the man who could walk through walls, escape from impossible restraints, make elephants disappear - the greatest illusionist and magician of all time.
Now Doug Henning, the youthful incarnation of Houdini's spirit and craft and the famous star of Broadway's The Magic Show, pays homage to the master in this remarkable portrait of the man behind the legend and the legend itself. Houdini: His Legend and His Magic presents a wonderful gallery - much of it in full color - of memorabilia of Houdini's life and exploits: contemporary photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, posters, eyewitnesses reminiscences. Even Houdini's personal scrapbook, accompanied by a delightful biographical narrative, is included.
Doug Henning leads us through Houdini's ten most spectacular illusions, including "The Chinese Water Torture Cell Escape," "The Vanishing Elephant" and the great "Needle trick," with such verve that the reader feels he is watching a live performance by the great man himself. Numerous original photographs allow allow the reader to follow the great mysterious step by step.
In contrast to the incredible rumors and tales that proliferated after Houdidni's death and which sustained the exotic mythology by which he is popularly remembered to this day. Doug Henning describes the real Houdini: "There were many Houdinis: Houdini the simple, honorable man with strong roots to his Middle-European heritage, devoted husband and son with a love of family and a puritanical sense of behavior that could not be violated; Houdini, supreme egoist and ruthless self-promotor, beer-hall, dime-museum and circus showman, master publicist and vaudeville headliner; Houdini, scholar, collector, and tireless researcher into the roots of his chosen profession of legitimate deception; Houdinid, crusader against fraud and charlatanism and tireless seeker for the answer to the riddle that was implicit in all of his performances - that of death and ressurecction. All of these are part of the real Houdini and of the legend that remains a half century after his demise.
