Select Secrets: Rare & Important Magicana

Laurant, Eugene (Eugene Greenleaf). Magician Eugene Laurant’s Theatrical Scrapbooks. Kept by the famed American magician, two of the three albums chronicle the years 1896 - 1906, and feature, among other ephemera, a program from his first performance as a boy magician, numerous handbills, vaudeville programs, pictorial brochures, and hundreds of newspaper and magazine clippings, filling many pages to nearly overflowing. The first album bound in textured calf, the cover gilt stamped with Laurant’s name, the second bound in black cloth. Many inked annotations by Laurant or his wife appear adjacent to the material pasted down, and several typed or handwritten notes in the second book, by Laurant himself, record personal anecdotes from early in his career, in preparation for a book he planned to write but did not complete. The third album, from later in Laurant’s career, includes letters of endorsement, pictorial brochures, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera related to his school shows and other post-Chautauqua performances in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Over 250 pages in all, containing thousands of individual items. A remarkable and personal chronicle of one of the best-known and most successful magicians in his field. Eugene Laurant scored his biggest artistic successes on the rural entertainment circuits known as Chautauqua and Lyceum. Beginning in 1896, as the records in these books show, he steadily worked his way across the country with a magic show that was ever-evolving. Performing under the auspices of the famed Redpath Bureau, among others, he crisscrossed the country for decades developing a trademark style and feature effects including the Sands of the Desert and a unique Linking Ring routine. (So strong were his versions of these effects that Laurant’s routines were described in the now-classic books Greater Magic and The Tarbell Course in Magic, respectively.) These scrapbooks record many of the earliest incidents in his professional life, and show, through images and words alike, his rise to prominence as the “Man of Many Mysteries.”