Jim Hagy: Chronicling Magicians and their Audiences
Jim Hagy began publishing magic history at age 11 and never stopped. Now a distinguished historian and author, he discusses his unique approach to magic's past - focusing on social history and audience relationships rather than methods. From his childhood correspondence with Milbourne Christopher to his latest books about animals in 19th-century magic, Jim reveals how conjuring reflects broader cultural attitudes and why the magic community's welcoming nature opened doors to its greatest minds.
Transcript
Coming up in this episode of The Magic Book Podcast.
Jim Hagy [:
After 60-plus years at the fringes of the magic community, I learned something every single day in the three years of this project about the intersection between human magicians and what I call animal wizards: non-human magicians in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Adrian Tennant [:
You're listening to The Magic Book Podcast, conversations about classic and contemporary books that teach, illuminate, and celebrate the art of magic. I'm your host, Adrian Tennant, a lifetime student of magic and mentalism, occasional performer, and longtime book collector. Thanks for joining me. Today my guest is Jim Hagy, a distinguished magic historian, author and educator whose contributions to preserving magic's past span six decades. Jim began publishing his "Mystics Quarterly" at age 11, foreshadowing a prolific career in magic history literature. He's authored acclaimed books including "Early English Conjuring" about Henry Evans Evanion and James Savren, and "Fair Tricks: The Magicians of the Columbian Exposition Chicago, 1893." Jim is a member of the Inner Magic Circle with Gold star and in 2023 received the literary Award from the Milbourne Christopher Foundation for his lifetime contributions to magic literature. Jim continues his passion for magic history through "Perennial Mystics Squared" and has recently published two volumes on animals in magic, "Animal Wizards: A Critical History of Magicians' Most Trusting Assistants" and "Animal Wizards: An Insider's Guide."
Adrian Tennant [:
Jim also writes a bimonthly column for Genii magazine called "Sleightly Astonishing." Jim, welcome to The Magic Book Podcast.
Jim Hagy [:
Adrian, thanks for inviting me to be with you today.
Adrian Tennant [:
Well, let's start at the very beginning, Jim, what were your earliest experiences with magic?
Jim Hagy [:
Well, like maybe many of your listeners, I first became interested in magic by seeing a magician when I was 6 or 7 and then getting a magic set, a magic kit for the holidays that same year, I guess, and continued to be intrigued by magic and began to visit a local magic shop and eventually to perform. Unlike most of your listeners though, I got distracted early on by the history of magic. And so while I disclaim performing, at least for the last 40 years, I've continued to be interested in the history of conjuring and of variety arts, and particularly the relationship between magicians and their audiences. So a lot of my work is informed by that.
Adrian Tennant [:
Your path into magic publishing actually began remarkably early. At age 11, you started "Mystics Quarterly." What inspired you to begin publishing at such a young age?
Jim Hagy [:
Probably poor judgment. My mother was an author and I was always from an early age interested in writing. There's happily no one, not even David Copperfield's library, has a copy of my first publication, which was a periodical about the American Civil War, which was circulated only in such a limited quantity that I think I'm the only one that still has it. But from 11, I became intrigued with the idea of writing for magicians. And because the magic community is so welcoming, pretty quickly had subscribers around the US and eventually in 11 foreign countries and advertisers from the large magic shops in the US and the UK and beyond. So people are just very kind. And it snowballed. So that earliest publication was a monthly for six-plus years during my elementary and secondary school education.
Adrian Tennant [:
How did that early experience with "Mystics Quarterly" influence your later path as a historian and book publisher?
Jim Hagy [:
I come back again and again to how kind on reflection, after, for me, 62 years, the magic community and certainly the magic history community, which is an even tighter knit group of people, are how welcoming and how supportive. So I was recently going back for another purpose to correspondence I had with magic historian-oriented people in the 1960s. And all of them were gracious. They responded, they contributed essays to whatever publication I was involved in. So whether you can pick, you know, Milbourne Christopher or Peter Warlock or Jimmy Findlay or all of these people who are being published in serious ways elsewhere, all of them and more were contributors to this kid that was producing things from Cleveland, Ohio. A number of years ago, the Magic Collectors Association ran out of people to honor, I think, and so they picked Richard Kaufman and me. And we decided to have a sort of interactive conversation from the stage about our early experience in magic. And my premise then I think still stands, which is that being pathetic works.
Jim Hagy [:
And I was as pathetic as possible. And it attracted lots of support from kind people.
Adrian Tennant [:
I'm curious, did you write to them individually? How do you request an article from Milbourne Christopher? I'm fascinated.
Jim Hagy [:
There were, there are sort of three pathways, I think. First, I did write to people from my earliest days. So "Mystics Magazine” came out beginning in 1966 and I wrote to people. I featured a magician each month and a little profile and asked them to send me things that I could publish. Second pathway is that I spent several vacations with a very kind, supportive mother in New York City and went to the Magician's Roundtable, which then met daily for lunch in New York where lots of people were extremely kind. I mean, a guy named Ed Mishell mentored me and I, you know, have photos still sitting next to S. Leo Horowitz or chatting with Al Flosso, or with Lou Tannen, and other people live and those relationships endured. Milbourne Christopher is a unique experience, I suppose in the sense that on one of those trips I called directory assistance, which for your chronologically younger listeners, they might not know what that is. In the old days, you had a local printed phone book, but if you wanted the number of someone in another city, you called a human being in that city and you asked if you could have their phone number.
Jim Hagy [:
So I asked for Milbourne Christopher's number. I was provided that number and I called Milbourne Christopher and introduced myself as a 12-year-old interested in magic history and asked if I could meet him for five minutes. And he bettered that by saying that I should come to his house for the afternoon and see his library and chat. So that's what I did. And it formed a relationship that continued for the rest of Milbourne's life.
Adrian Tennant [:
That's wonderful. I understand you funded your university education at least in part through magic, but you ultimately made the decision to stop performing professionally. So, Jim, why was that?
Jim Hagy [:
I suppose there's several reasons. My kidder's reason, which I recently mentioned in another context, was that one of my peers, someone almost my exact same age as David Copperfield, with whom I still stay in touch, and I wanted to get out of his way to give him more opportunity. So I decided to go off and be a lawyer. That's not the real answer, but I'll take credit for that. I suppose as passionate as I've been about magic, it's a really tough way to make a living. I mean, for every David Copperfield, there are hundreds if not thousands of aspiring professionals, certainly through the time in which I was performing - the 60s and 70s - who enjoyed magic and enjoyed audiences but never really thrived economically. So I was risk-averse.
Jim Hagy [:
Right. And that's my theory about why many people become big-firm lawyers. I advised clients on global deals and was calm about that. But if I went to the local store to buy a footstool, you know, I was paralyzed because it's $100 of my own money and I'm risk-averse. So I suppose the real answer is I went off to do something that was more assured to support me. Having said that, I did perform both, you know, starting with birthday parties and stuff and eventually doing a stage show and performing a little bit overseas during my university years and then stopped completely. So I would still, 40 some years later, disclaim being a performing magician. There are plenty of people, including your listeners, who perform either for pay or for pleasure, and I celebrate all of them.
Jim Hagy [:
But I'm not a competitor.
Adrian Tennant [:
Well, you worked for a global law firm. And I'm curious, Jim, did that afford you the ability to travel internationally?
Jim Hagy [:
It did. I, as you say, was with one of the - by accident - with a firm that became one of the largest global law firms and ran one of their practices. So I traveled a lot, both domestically and internationally, and it gave me a chance to renew and form new acquaintances with magicians around the world as I did that. In my second life, I took what I hoped still sounds like to your listeners in early retirement 20 years ago now, to instead be an academic and teach law. And during the first 12 or so of those years, I thought the way you got better at something was to do it as much as possible. And so I taught at five places, three in the US and then in a field program in Europe and also at Peking University School of Transnational Law. So I was still traveling a lot and with better control of my schedule because I wasn't serving clients anymore. So that was another opportunity to see folks and in the old days before the Internet, visit bookstores and search for conjuring books and whatnot.
Jim Hagy [:
So I've . . . you're right, I had a pretty big footprint.
Adrian Tennant [:
Well, you started writing magic history books in the 1980s, publishing "Early English Conjuring Collectors: Henry Evans Evanion and James Savren." In 1985, I did a bit of research and reviewing it for The Magic Circular. Professor Eddie Dawes wrote, "James Hagy has produced a most valuable addition to the biographical literature of magic, and his delightful monograph is unreservedly recommended." Of course, you would get to know Eddie well over the following years. But what drew you to Evanion and Savren specifically?
Jim Hagy [:
It was a complete accident. I was visiting the still phenomenal collection at the University of Texas at The Harry Ransom Center, not only of books and posters, but of small ephemera. And I was going through a file that was labeled Henry Ridgely Evans, who is an early 20th century magic author, and because I guess I'd misspent my youth, recognized that this was not Henry Ridgely Evans' handwriting, which I'd seen in items in my own collection and by examining it more, came to the conclusion that it was actually Evanion – Henry Evans Evanion's writing. And it was a misfiled set of all the correspondence between Houdini and Evanion. Evanion was a 19th century struggling magician, performer in his own right, but also had an early passion for collecting posters and ephemera of magicians. And there's a short but famous part of "Unmasking" by Harry Houdini that mentions finding, connecting with Evanion who is late in life and struggling and trying to sell things and buying eventually many of these gems that Evanion had in his collection. So suddenly we had, through this file, a broader insight into both Evanion and his relationship with Houdini. So I wasn't visiting Texas with the idea of doing that monograph, but there it was.
Jim Hagy [:
So I pursued that in some other collections, British Library, private collections, other places, and produced that book. Had I had an objective of finding a sort of perfect first topic for The Magic Circle, I never would have stumbled onto Evanion on my own. But the following year, I presented that topic parallel to the book at The Magic Circle's History Day, which Eddie and Peter Lane and others curated, and to my great surprise and very humbled, was elevated to Member of the Inner Magic Circle, not based on Erdnase or illusion, but on writing that book. So that book was very kind to me, not only then, but 20 years later, when the hundred-year anniversary of Evanion's death came and the British Library called me and essentially said, "Did you write a biography of Henry Evanion?" Like, who would have done that? And I said "Yes," and became invited as a keynote speaker for their summer series. So if I had started life with an objective of being a keynote speaker at the British Library, it never would have occurred to any of us to pick Evanion. So that book was very, very good to me. In a time of easier and more elaborate color printing, there's now a second edition of that book which is, I think, much more attractive. It celebrates more of Evanion's print material in his collection, but it still has legs.
Adrian Tennant [:
Excellent. If you're enjoying this episode of The Magic Book Podcast, please consider leaving a rating on Spotify or a review on Apple Podcasts. You can also follow The Magic Book Podcast page on Facebook. Thanks. Jim, you mentioned your interest not just in magic, but in magic audiences. How does your approach to researching and writing about magic's past differ from other authors, would you say?
Jim Hagy [:
Well, it's definitely quirky. I disclaim being a methods person. Not only don't I perform, but, you know, I obviously know how some - maybe many - tricks work, but I'm more interested in the sort of social history of the magician in the context of their times and their successes and struggles, but also how audiences view magic. So my own focus of my modest library, for example, is on books, 19th century, mostly books aimed at the public. So small pamphlets that someone would hope you'd buy in a train station for yourself or for your child to look at. So how the general public perceives magic and magicians. That draws me also into thinking about plots. I'm always wondering why the tricks that magicians perform were chosen the way they were.
Jim Hagy [:
I mean, when you think during the vaudeville era, for example, that there were many magicians who were listed on vaudeville programs merely as "manipulator." No mention of magic or conjuring or anything. It's clear that the audience was expected to - and presumably did - understand what that was. But in a 21st century context – while there's still fantastic performers who do manipulation, I celebrate them – if you merely said "You're going to show up and watch somebody make billiard balls appear in their hands and disappear repeatedly," I'm not sure that's a selling-point for ticket sales. So it's a different audience for a different time. Maybe we'll talk again, perhaps when we get to "Animal Wizards" about examples like the Rabbit Wringer effect. When I talk to students I teach an animal law and policy course, I describe to them what the Rabbit Wringer is.
Jim Hagy [:
And while presumably no audience worried that the rabbit was actually being crushed through the mangle, you have to think about from a mid-20th century perspective, and then from a 2025 perspective. I guess it's intended to be funny, and maybe it was. I have to confess, I performed that trick, although not with a live rabbit. But why is it so funny? And does that endure today to the idea of squashing a live animal for the amusement of an audience. So anyway, I think a lot about how audiences interact with our community.
Adrian Tennant [:
You've written about figures like William Henry Young and of course, the many unsung magicians at the 1893 Columbian Exhibition. What draws you to these lesser known stories?
Jim Hagy [:
"Fair Tricks: The Magicians at the Columbian Exposition" at The Chicago World's Fair of 1893 came about in a slightly different way, but also by accident. My spouse - my new spouse, we've been married only 48 years! - has a long interest in collecting ephemera from the Chicago World's Fair from the time we moved to Chicago 40 years ago. And, you know, there were always rumors that Houdini was perhaps performing at the Chicago World's Fair, but very little documentation to confirm it. So in my transition to my second life, when I had more free time, I began to look at institutional collections for anything that would connect Houdini with the fair. And then one day looked in my own files that I was dusting off and found a letter from T. Nelson Downs to John Mulholland late in Downs' life confirming that he had met Houdini at the fair. So if I had bothered to open my own desk drawer, I would have had the confirmation I needed.
Jim Hagy [:
So Houdini was at the fair as a performer. Howard Thurston was there, not performing as a magician, but sort of as a tout for a sideshow. But we began to find that there were other magicians that we choose to think of as international. Many of the press thought of them as Oriental, although that really conflated lots of different ethnicities, from Japan and China and the Indian subcontinent to Turkey. But there were many magicians performing at and around the fair, some under-appreciated, often exploited, many abandoned after the fair with no way to get home. And this is a pattern that also replicated in England in the ensuing decades. There's a circus magnate by the name of Carl Hagenback, who saw magicians used at the fair and began to use them himself in his exhibitions in Europe and was criticized for leaving performers at the end of their contracts with no way to get home. And the Indian Consulate, for example, was very concerned about that, because these Indian performers experiencing homelessness on the streets of Europe would fall to them.
Jim Hagy [:
So in any event, it was interesting to us. Not that story, not only because it was about magicians or about the fair, but it really read from what could be today's newspapers. It was about curiosity about 'the other' if you will, about people from other places and immigrant sentiment and anti-immigrant sentiment and visa challenges. Shortly after the Chicago World's Fair, Ching Ling Foo came to the Omaha Fair a couple of years later and, in theory, overstayed his visa and was intercepted by federal officials and imprisoned in Chicago. He challenged his visa status, saying he wasn't a laborer, that he was an artist. Eventually prevailed. And so a lot of those things could have come out of today's headlines, at least in the US.
Adrian Tennant [:
Well, you've also written "Secrets Magicians Could Tell: The Art of Presenting ... You!" What inspired that project?
Jim Hagy [:
Well, you're making me think that I stumble into all of these topics by accident. Maybe that's true. But that book started in two ways. One, I was teaching at Peking University, and one of my students came up to me after class and asked whether I do a lot of speaking, which I did and still do, and then asked whether I'm more nervous in front of large audiences – a theater – than a couple people. And I thought to myself, "The answer to that was 'no' but that would be a stupid answer. That wouldn't be helpful." So I told her some other things and I'm sure she did great. She had won a prize and was going to Australia to present to a couple of thousand people. But on the way home from China, I thought, "Well, why is it?"
Jim Hagy [:
"Why is it that, you know, I worry about engaging with the audience and telling them something that's useful or that's entertaining or engaging, but I'm not worried that there are more people in the audience or less?" And I realized that really is from the fantastic but probably cruel beginning of starting as a magician, like many of your listeners, maybe that, you know, you have to get up in front of the audience and hopefully be heard audibly and make eye contact. But also the magic has to work. And if you use animals, which I didn't, but if you use animals that the animals survive and are treated well, all these things are going on, which is a very complicated way to have a first experience appearing before an audience. So after that, if you get invited somewhere and all you have to do is talk, it seems simpler. So that's step one. Step two: I was at a magic history event in Hamburg, I guess about the same time, and an old friend, Wittus Witt, who owns a magic museum now, and he's a publisher and a performer of his own right of long standing in Germany, asked me if I had ever thought about whether my experiences as a magician influenced how I interact and communicate with people in my law life and in my teaching life.
Jim Hagy [:
And the answer was sort of "yes." So that book is the result of thinking about how our exposures to magic may set the stage, influence our techniques, our skills, even if we're not thinking about them in interacting with other people, whether it's two people having a conversation or a thousand people in a room. I intended that book originally mostly for non-magicians, for my students, for example, but then it also got a couple of reviews which I'm very grateful for. A couple of wildly, ridiculously favorable reviews. There's an online post by David Ben, for example, saying "It is an essential reading for every magician." I would never have said that. But as a result it's now, I think, going to be in a second printing soon, too.
Jim Hagy [:
It's been out of print for a little while, but I'm very grateful that people are interested in it. But it also is very quirky and it's got lots of color illustrations of historical magic and references to the past. So that's the genesis of that book.
Adrian Tennant [:
You mentioned being quirky. I have noticed, Jim, you really like a square format. All of the books that I have from you, they're beautifully illustrated, but they're square. Which brings me to the next point, which is your periodical, "Perennial Mystics," which has evolved over the decades, the current incarnation of which is "Perennial Mystics Squared." And it is indeed a square format. Before we get into that, what is it about the square format that you enjoy so much?
Jim Hagy [:
When we first were thinking about putting out "Fair Tricks," so the latest iteration of us publishing, the "Fair Tricks" book and maybe the animal book we're going to talk about, could have gone with the trade publisher into the normal marketplace and been distributed through Amazon and bookstores and whatnot. And it might have reached a broader audience. But my experience for my business and academic life is that a lot of non-fiction books have a very short life, a very long production time. They tend to be black-and-white. They're not very interesting graphically, and of course, they make nothing for the author. I mean, being an author is a very tough world if you're trying to support yourself that way. The royalties are very small. So we could do that or we could do what I've done over the many years, which is to publish privately, both for the magic audience and a little bit for the non-magic audience.
Jim Hagy [:
Shorter cycle times, better control of the content, can design it the way we want. So we decided to do that. And the question then was how to best communicate that this wasn't a sort of vanity press for somebody who can't get their romance novel published. But it's something that was deliberately crafted for this audience. So something that didn't look like it was in the normal shape, normal format. Square design, uniform, lots of color illustrations, sort of establishing a brand. I need to be careful because your host, Adrian, is the brand expert and I'm not, so he can critique me another day about my success in that. But the book started to be square and we followed that same format with the latest iteration of this little periodical about magic history, "Perennial Mystics."
Adrian Tennant [:
Well, this little periodical, as you put it, yes, it has a limited circulation, but just over the past year or so you've featured contributions from - among many others: Michelle Ainsworth, Charlie Randall, Richard Wiseman, George Daily, Ray Ricard, Todd Harris, Magic Christian, Dr. Bruce Averbook, and two previous guests on this podcast, your friend Jim Kleefeld and Julie Eng. So, Jim, tell us about the aims of the periodical.
Jim Hagy [:
Over the course of the last 50 or 60 years, there have from time to time been limited circulation publications that were, it seemed to me, designed not only to encourage the sort of normal suspects who will write no matter what, but others who have something to share. Maybe not book length. Maybe everybody isn't as comfortable with authoring something that is for Gibecière or for Genii, but who have something interesting to share and to be part of this community. And historically, "The Midget Magician" in England or "Magic Cauldron" in the US are great examples. Or the "Magical Bookie," sort of small boutique publications like that where people could send in bite-sized content. The idea of "Perennial Mystic Squared" was to celebrate those people and to encourage them to write something small and from a 2025 graphics format, or maybe just my own preference, have it again be professionally designed, have it be in color, have it be on archival paper, have images each time and have it be spiffy from a physical production perspective. So that's how it started, was to encourage the usual voices and also other voices from our community to share some small bite-sized story and something that could be in a very personal voice or in a scholarly voice and something that was never going to be a book of its own, some little story that would otherwise be lost.
Jim Hagy [:
So we've been very fortunate. I originally planned to have one or two of those a year. We're now producing, I think, our 14th number. There are seven parts to each one. So they're very quirky, they're designed in that square way. And we've been very fortunate to have lots of people contribute.
Adrian Tennant [:
How do you maintain those high standards while at the same time encouraging new contributors?
Jim Hagy [:
It's a great question. First off, we're lucky that the people in this community are terrific and we welcome their content and celebrate what they send us. I think whether it's "Perennial Mystics" or whether it's other material coming to the marketplace. I talked for a minute at The Magic Circle recently when I was interviewed by them live. It seems to me maybe it's not a crisis and there is room for different viewpoints, but it seems to me that if on the one hand I hope I hold myself, and I think most of us hold ourselves to, if not be perfect, to do the best we can, to have the research be complete, to avoid typos to the extent we can, to have it be serious content. And at the same time, we're human, which I hate, but we're all human. I mean, somebody told me recently, as Stephen Minch said, that everything that he's produced always has a typo because we can never be perfect. And I mention that only because it seems to me that if we're going to encourage inclusion, to encourage people to participate and to share, that they too need to be liberated from the idea that they're going to produce something and we're going to critique them about it, that there's a typo on page three or there's one footnote that is inaccurate or something else.
Jim Hagy [:
So I've started by trying to forgive myself, which is hard to do, from imperfections in what I produce because I trained as a lawyer, trained as an academic, try my best with magic, and yet - damn! - something sneaks in. So I think there's this conflict between our desire to be as good as we can be and to be inclusive and forgiving. And that sort of intrigues me as I get farther along. So the point of "Perennial Mystics" is to be celebratory and to accept that there are going to be different styles, different voices, and maybe it'll be imperfect, and that's okay.
Adrian Tennant [:
Have you ever rejected a submission for any of your periodicals?
Jim Hagy [:
Oh, that's a very sinister question. I've never been asked that before. Obviously, we like most of the magic publications which rely on volunteered submissions. You'd like the answer to be "no" because you want people who spent the time to submit something to be . . . feel valued. We have not declined something based on writing quality. I try not to edit people's stuff, but I . . . if some people welcome it, especially if English isn't their first language, and we'll do that and then submit it back to them. But I have once or twice sidestepped a great submission because it's not celebratory. One of the few sort of editorial standards we have which we don't advertise is, you know, I guess I feel that if someone has passed away long ago and they have something in their past that is unflattering, if we were writing about Hitler or Churchill or Donald Trump, it would be an important and relevant part of their biography.
Jim Hagy [:
But come on, I mean, we're magicians celebrating this performing art. And if there's something distinctly unhappy about the past of someone, I prefer that not to be part of our content. So it has a place in magic, it has a place in history. It may get published somewhere else, but probably not with me.
Adrian Tennant [:
Great clarification. Thank you. Just a reminder that you can be notified when new episodes of this podcast are published by subscribing to the email alerts. You'll find all the details on the podcast website at TheMagicBookPodcast.com, which is where you can also find transcripts plus accompanying blog posts with summaries, timestamps, and links to resources mentioned in each episode. Jim, your latest major work is " Animal Wizards: A Critical History of Magicians' Most Trusting Assistants," with a companion book, "Animal Wizards: An Insider's Guide." What inspired you to tackle this subject?
Jim Hagy [:
Again, I suppose I was inevitably going to find myself at the crossroads of this project in the sense that I'd been interested in magic and magic's history for 60-plus years now, had a career as a lawyer and then as an academic. I teach an animal law and policy course every semester to law students, and I'm passionate about animals and animal rights and animal welfare. So those three things collided. I began to talk to students in this animal law and policy course over the last four or five years who would, you know, see in passing on social media or something that I was a magician, would ask me about the intersection of animals and magicians. And your listeners may think I have no friends, but I still have a couple friends and one or two of them are not magicians. They're not academics, they're not lawyers, they're just real people. And they teased me that this project sounded like the best way to lose all of my friends, both in the magic community and the animal rights community, because it would be so hard to come to some responsible conclusion about the experience that animals had. But I embraced that challenge.
Jim Hagy [:
I found it more and more interesting. And after 60-plus years at the fringes of the magic community, I learned something every single day in the three years of this project about the intersection between human magicians and what I call "animal wizards," non-human magicians in the 19th and early 20th centuries. I cheated a little bit by having the book be only in historical context of that period ending with vaudeville. So I don't want to or need to make any judgment about people who are using animals in their acts today. Although I say in passing in the introduction to the book that I know of none or almost no magicians today who are indifferent to the welfare of their animals. So, you know, when I teach, I have students this past semester in my class who are everything from members of rodeo families, believe it or not, even though I teach in urban Chicago, to people who are in the food supply, to obviously people who are passionate and are vegans, or even who think that having companion animals, having pets should be criminalized because it's not natural for animals to be in our homes. So there's a wide range of possible viewpoints that readers bring to this project, to this topic, and I leave them to form their own conclusions about where the line is with respect to animals and entertainment. But having said that, I look at, you know, why animals at all? What were the plot lines? We look at a dozen or so central tricks that involved animals over this period, and most importantly, what was the lived experience of the animals on stage, backstage, traveling, in daily life, and across a broad range of animals, from companion animals like dogs, to goldfish, to rabbits, obviously, to large exotic animals.
Jim Hagy [:
So, anyway, I found the project really challenging, but really exciting. I've never had a topic about which I was more immersed and passionate.
Adrian Tennant [:
Among the effects you discuss in "Animal Wizards" is The Vanishing Birdcage. Jim, can you tell us a bit about why this was such a controversial effect?
Jim Hagy [:
Well, it was first performed by Buatier de Kolta in the 1870s and was an immediate hit. And, of course, because we're magicians and we can't use intellectual property to protect our inventions very easily, it was immediately copied. So it was featured by many magicians in Europe and the US. One of the things that I thought was intriguing, that was right in front of us but never really a focus, was within a very short time, within a couple of years, de Kolta would begin to advertise on his broadsides that he was going to perform that popular, famous trick using an artificial bird. So it indicates that the audiences evidently were already sensitive to the experience that the bird was having. And this is running parallel, which I describe in the book, too, to the evolution not only of animal rights and laws with respect to the protection of animals, but societal attitudes with respect to the welfare of animals generally and animals in entertainment. Rolling forward, there are a lot of things in between, but many of your listeners may remember in passing that Carl Hertz did the [Vanishing] Birdcage and appeared before a British parliamentary investigation of the experiences of animals and entertainment in 1921, 22. And there was eventually some legislation in 1925, but very much watered down.
Jim Hagy [:
I read the, I don't know, 600 pages of the transcript so that readers don't have to, your listeners don't have to. But if you do read it all, it reads very much like a modern political hearing in the sense that clearly the panelists had strong views, they were different views, so you could argue that the panel is balanced. But each member of that panel was trying to bully all the witnesses into providing testimony that would favor their view, which was liberally allowing animals to be displayed in entertainment or prohibiting animals from being used altogether. Magic was just a small part of those investigations, but it wasn't limited to the birdcage. There were other amateur and professional magicians who testified as well. The thing I think is helpful about that trick and about those hearings is it gives us a better idea of what the different views of society were with respect to the experiences of animals and how that intersected more broadly with animal rights.
Adrian Tennant [:
Yeah, you paint a picture of a London that I don't think many of us think about, where, you know, livestock was often walking the streets. I mean, there were abattoirs in the center of London. The relationship that we had as a society with animals evolved, obviously, over time. So that's also kind of a thread through the book as well.
Jim Hagy [:
I think that's right. And I try to start by asking myself, and then sharing with the readers, why animals at all? I mean, they're - obviously, there's an investment in them and a need to care for them, hopefully at some level. But you need to keep them alive and move them along if you're using them as a traveling performer. So there must be some reason why magicians went to all that bother. And part of that is what I think of as audience complicity. I mean, audiences generally enjoyed seeing animals.
Jim Hagy [:
Some people were concerned about them as a matter of animal welfare and animal rights. But most people, you know, embrace them or they wouldn't have appeared. Beyond that, though, I think that going back even to the 18th century, animals were familiar objects. I mean, they were seen on the streets or maybe seen in people's homes. If you were traveling in small towns, you were performing for agrarian audiences that had animals themselves. And I think that maybe most importantly, it was convincing to audiences because animals couldn't be gimmicked, right? If you showed up and you showed a small box painted with Oriental characters, "What is that? I've never seen that before, and it looks suspicious."
Jim Hagy [:
But if you produce a pig or a dog or a rabbit or a bird, it's less suspicious. While I focus on the late 19th and early 20th century, I have a chapter called 'Grim Beginnings' that does look at earlier periods. And the reason that comes to mind just now is one of those other common tricks, late 18th, early 19th century, was the decapitation and restoration of a bird. And while there are methods to do that that don't actually decapitate a bird, some of the early methods clearly did cause the magician to take one bird and decapitate it and then show it around. And I argue that one of the reasons to do that, although it's clearly cruel, is that if you're a, you know, a farmer sitting in a tavern in the 1790s and the magician says he's going to restore this bird, you know, "I want to see it first! Don't just tell me that you've cut the head off. Let's pass it around the room and see that it's decapitated." So this is why I think audiences are complicit in this.
Adrian Tennant [:
You've got a few other grim examples in that same chapter, but let's not talk about that. Let the reader enjoy those. In the book, you write that whenever you ask grade schoolers, quote: "What a magician might do with a hat, virtually every child gets a top score. The vision of a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat is even more enduring and reliable than asking them to name a magician." So, Jim, why did magicians start pulling rabbits from hats?
Jim Hagy [:
Well, that's a great question, and I'm not sure that I've uncovered the solution. Jim Steinmeyer, for example, suggests that rabbits were obvious to come from hats because hats used to have fur linings. And so there's a sort of association of the fabric and the hat with the rabbit. Maybe that's right. I mean, Eddie Dawes tries also, I think unsuccessfully, to get to the bottom of the genesis of rabbits in hats. And I'm not sure there's a single answer. I will say that many of the best magic scholars, magic historians, suggest that the rabbit and hat, while it was iconic, wasn't performed very often. And I stumbled on it being performed a lot. So I think that we've maybe underestimated how many magicians actually used that trick.
Jim Hagy [:
One of the challenges and why the project resulted in two books is I also didn't want to get kicked-out of the magic community for revealing secrets. And yet how tricks work obviously affected the experience of the animals. So in the main book, the book that's intended for muggles as well as magicians, I have a taxonomy, essentially a gradation of severity of or happiness of the animal that runs from very unhappy to very low impact. And they're represented by the symbols of little origami figures of different colors. The "Insider's" book not only talks about human magicians and anecdotes that might interest only the magic community, but acknowledges some of the methods so that we can talk frankly amongst ourselves a little more. The main book, as a result, virtually no disclosure of secrets, just to defend myself. And second, it really is - we wanted to be faithful to telling these stories from the perspective of the animals as the stars, not the magicians.
Jim Hagy [:
So there are many leading and obscure magicians mentioned in that main book, but always as supporting characters to the experience of the animals.
Adrian Tennant [:
I'm curious if any of your opinions about the use of animals in performance changed, from when you started writing the book to when you are now, looking back at its publication.
Jim Hagy [:
Well, I am hopeful in the main book that I've left the judgments to the individual reader, and I think I'm happy with the balance I struck, in an odd way. My experience is that when I talk to non-magic audiences, to animal rights audiences, they read the book as my having an enormous bias toward animal rights, which is okay. I support animal welfare. And when I talk to magic audiences, they think that I'm supportive of the magic community and am reserving judgment with respect to the experience of animals. And that's largely – except for those early grim experiences – that's largely true, too. So maybe I've succeeded only in the sense that people read into the book a bias by me that matches their own. But I think that I've tried to stay in the middle.
Jim Hagy [:
Having said that, I've never used an animal in my own performance. And again, I think that most . . . almost every magician I've met in my lifetime cares about, believes sincerely that they are being kind, being careful with respect to the animals in their shows and in their lives. Couple exceptions, and different people may disagree. I mean, there's a Swiss academic that believes that if you have a dog as a pet and you teach it to shake hands, that that should be criminalized because it's not a natural act, that it's done only for your amusement. So if you're that person, then every single magician or circus person or zoo that is displaying or using an animal is inappropriate. I don't take that extreme view, but I understand it. I guess, one other thing is, Adrian, as I think about this, when you talk about the streets of London and livestock and abattoirs and whatnot, in the context of its time producing a rabbit from a hat that then goes home with you each night,
Jim Hagy [:
hopefully, happy is pretty low impact compared to the 10,000 animals being trudged through the streets of London and ending up on somebody's food table and where probably the transition from live animal to food was not very happy either. So I think it's in context. I often tease non-magic audiences at the beginning of my speech by saying in the first five minutes or so that they're probably wondering, why am I not talking about Toby the Sapient Pig? Which, of course they aren't, because they have no idea who that is. But when we think about learning animals like Toby, first off, I presume if the magician has a learned pig, you can't just take another pig off the farm and use it that same evening. You've got to have a period of training, so it's a valuable asset. So presumably you care for it. But in addition, you know, what are Toby's other career choices? Toby is otherwise, like most of his peers, going to end up on somebody's dinner table. And so by comparison, Toby's life was pretty good.
Jim Hagy [:
I'm not justifying it if people think that animals shouldn't be used in entertainment, I get that. But Toby was the lucky one out of his peer group.
Adrian Tennant [:
Well, this year you began writing a bi-monthly column for Genii magazine called "Sleightly Astonishing." How did that come about?
Jim Hagy [:
Well, as Genii reimagined itself for the future with Jim Steinmeyer as its editor and Julie Eng as its business leader, to my surprise, they came to me and asked me if I'd consider doing a column. And I think the original idea was to enthuse people about magic's heritage, its history, but without defining it as a formal discussion of historical topics. So what I took away from that and became the format of the column was to start the first month by telling the Genii readers that although I knew some of them, I didn't know most of them, but I knew they had a secret power that didn't take mastering Erdnase, that didn't take actually doing tricks, but that they were really a gateway to non-magicians, to muggles' curiosity about magic. Most people don't meet somebody who's involved in the magic community every day. And so I presume that most of your listeners also have had the experience of somebody just being curious about, not just ourselves, but about the magic community in general. And I think that once you get beyond that, at least what I'm trying to convince the reader, is that if we were interested in visual art and painting, we wouldn't assume that, you know, Ai Weiwei was going to sit down with us and jam with us, or if we were interested in performance music, that Elton John would sit around and imagine lyrics with us. But the magic community, while we have lots of prominent people, if you go to magic events, they're present, they're accessible, they're generally very friendly. And so we have a very unusual, I think, arts community, because your listeners, even if they never perform a trick but just are enthusiastic about magic or go to a magic convention, they know a lot about inside baseball with respect to magic.
Jim Hagy [:
So that's the premise. So every subsequent month in the column, I try to do a couple of things. One to ask a question that muggles may ask us, that non-magicians may ask us, where we might want to have an informal prepared answer. "How did you get interested in magic? What was your first magic shop? How do magic tricks work?" - one thing and another. Second is to celebrate briefly someone that we think of as central to the magic community: Harold Rice with respect to Silk magic, or Ed Mishell, who is a columnist and illustrator, or Paul Fleming who succeeded to the Karl Germain show. All of those people are thought of as sort of central to magic, but none of them made their living as magicians, their primary living. They all did something else for a living. So I'm trying to relate to our readers, many of whom I assume are not professional magicians either, but are important members of our community.
Jim Hagy [:
And then I try to wrap it all up with something really quirky that is history-related, that might become part of the arsenal, part of the toolbox of the reader when he or she or they talk to friends about magic. But at the end of the day, I try to convince them that the anecdotes that are going to be most successful aren't the ones I give them or the ones that they read in one of Jim Steinmeyer's great books, but the ones that have stuck in their own minds from their own experience, because those are the ones that they're going to be most passionate about and that they're going to tell most effectively in an impromptu way. So anyway, that's the concept of the column is to be is to sneak magic history under the door.
Adrian Tennant [:
Well, this is The Magic Book Podcast. So Jim, what magic book - or books - do you most cherish in your own collection and why?
Jim Hagy [:
Wow. There are two prongs to that, I think. As somebody who loves print and still collects hard copy books, again, I'm interested mostly in books that were produced for public, non-magic audiences. So I can think of books that have survived in pristine condition or whether it's only one example, and I have some of each. And that I found in quirky ways. I mean, the most brilliantly colored gilt 19th century book I have on the shelves behind me as we're speaking is one that I rescued from a furniture store where it and two other books were being used to demonstrate that the bookcase that was being sold held books. So I confused the furniture store by asking that I didn't want to buy the bookcase, but I wanted to buy this book, which confused them. Eventually they sold it to me for $5.
Adrian Tennant [:
Wow.
Jim Hagy [:
So I like the idea of rescuing artifacts that otherwise wouldn't survive. In terms of books that I read over and over, I guess I really go back to my . . . clinging to my passion for social history. So if you look at Jim Steinmeyer's books, or certainly Eddie Dawes' lifetime body of work, things that I pick up and read more than once, there are those. I've recently – not convinced myself I'm going to perform again – but I have also been looking back at the many, many magic books that have small slivers of performance theory in them. Not just the main people like Juan Tamariz or Darwin Ortiz or somebody, but 19th and early 20th century suggestions of performance techniques, some of which I agree with, some of which I don't agree with. I'm trying to figure out what I'm going to do with all that at some point, but there are lots of very quirky suggestions about how magicians can interact with audiences.
Adrian Tennant [:
Jim, which of the books you've written are you proudest of?
Jim Hagy [:
I'm hesitating only because I wouldn't profess to take pride in any of them. It's up to other people to decide whether they resonate with them or not. It's just my attempt to share my enthusiasm for these topics with people who are my friends or I hope will become friends in the magic community. Having said that, I've for different reasons that we've discussed, I was passionate about each one of these books. But I think that, you know, on my tombstone I think this "Animal Wizards" book is going to be tough to beat because it really does satisfy my desire to think about the interaction between the magic community, audiences and also in this case, societal attitudes and legal developments with respect to the protection of animals. I just, every time I talk about this book with a magic or non-magic audience, the conversation is different. People's perspectives make me think about things in new ways. How audiences think about the plot lines of these tricks is different every time.
Jim Hagy [:
So I think it's going to be tough to beat.
Adrian Tennant [:
What's next for you, Jim? Do you have any new book projects in the works?
Jim Hagy [:
I always have a list. I was asked by a student recently whether I'm done now in the sense that I've addressed each of the topics that I had in mind and I don't. I've got a long list. And she seemed somehow disappointed by that, like I should be discouraged. And I don't think it'll surprise people listening to this podcast that, you know, I want to die with a list of things I still want to do, right. I want to be engaged until the last minute. I have a couple of small projects, not typical Hagy projects, but bite-sized traditional biographies. There's a guy named William Everhart, who was a magician, but mostly a juggler.
Jim Hagy [:
He was a hoop roller. He was the most successful hoop roller in vaudeville. And it turns out – I didn't know this for the first 30 years I was involved in magic. He's a relative of mine, he's an ancestor of mine. And an obscure relative reached out and said, "Do you do magic? What's this?" So I'm curious about Everhart and his spouse, a woman by the name of Minola Mada Hurst, who did other things, was a performer, was a singer, but was a performer of magic in the so-called 'Magic Teakettle Craze' in 1904 in London. And I know a lot about those two people that nobody else would bother to know about. So I feel compelled to put out a little book about them and I will. After that, I want to find another crossing point between the magic community and the real world.
Jim Hagy [:
Probably won't be able to top "Animal Wizards," but I have some ideas about the business of magic, if you will, in the 19th century, which again, celebrating magicians of the past, magicians of the present. You know, magic's a tough way to support yourself and that interests me in a way that I might be able to knit together into something quirky and surprising.
Adrian Tennant [:
Perfect. Great conversation, Jim. If listeners would like to learn more about you, your books, or possibly contribute to "Perennial Mystics, Squared," what's the best way for them to connect with you?
Jim Hagy [:
Thanks. The best thing to do, I don't maintain a web presence. We didn't talk about this, but most of my books are donated to support charities and whatnot. So it's very hard to figure out how to buy my stuff because it's normally not for sale. But if you want to connect with me, the easiest way is a pretty complicated email address, but I'll give it to you. It's Reginald Scot Books - Reginald Scot, like the author of "The Discoverie of Witchcraft" in 1584. So it's Reginald Scot - one 't' - reginaldscotbooks@comcast.net.
Adrian Tennant [:
Perfect. We'll also include that in the show notes. Jim, thank you so much for being my guest on The Magic Book Podcast.
Jim Hagy [:
My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me to be with you today.
Adrian Tennant [:
You've been listening to The Magic Book Podcast. In this episode, Jim Hagy shared his remarkable journey from an 11-year-old publisher to one of magic's most respected historians. We explored how his early experiences with "Mystics Quarterly" shaped his career. His unique approach as a social historian focusing on magician audience relationships rather than methods, and his groundbreaking two-volume work on animals and magic. Jim's dedication to connecting magic history with broader cultural themes, from immigrant experiences at the 1893 World's Fair to evolving attitudes toward animal welfare, demonstrate how the art of conjuring both reflects and influences the societies in which it flourishes. You'll find the transcript accompanying this episode on the website at TheMagicBookPodcast.com plus a blog post with a summary, timestamps, and links to the books Jim mentioned. And if you have a question or would like to suggest a topic for a future episode, please contact me: Adrian@TheMagicBookPodcast.com. thanks for listening to The Magic Book Podcast. I've been your host, Adrian Tennant.
Adrian Tennant [:
Until next time. Goodbye.
