Harry Houdini’s diary reveals a side of the famous magician’s life before his name became well known.
In a small notebook covered in dark red cloth, Houdini jotted down notes between 1897 and 1899, when he was touring small theaters and vaudeville halls.
These pages are especially important because Houdini changed some details of his accounts of his early career after he became famous.
The story of John Cox and the diary began in 1977, when, at the age of thirteen, he received a book about Houdini that included a photo of four pages from the diary.
Those pages kept piquing his curiosity until he saw the diary itself at an exhibition in Los Angeles in 2011, roughly thirty-five years later.
Physician and magic collector Bruce Averbuck had bought the diary at auction in 2004 for $41,400.
However, reading its pages was difficult, as they were full of abbreviations and obscure nicknames, as well as phrases Houdini had crossed out and rewritten in small handwriting.
After his retirement, Averbuck contacted magic historian Mike Caveney, who assembled a team that included Cox.
The team compared the notes with newspaper archives to identify the names of performers, the venues of the shows, and to understand the obscure references.
Thus, Houdini’s early notebook shed light on the world of traveling vaudeville, from trapeze acts to the theaters that witnessed his first steps toward fame.
