Margaret B. Steele: The Great Boomsky
Historian Margaret B. Steele discusses her groundbreaking book "The Great Boomsky" on The Magic Book Podcast, uncovering previously untold stories of African American performers in Alexander and Adelaide Herrmann's magic shows during the segregation era. Margaret shares insights from her research, the transformation she experienced as a writer, and the discovery of Isaac Willis's legacy in Nova Scotia. Margaret also discusses her publishing company, Floating Lady Publishing, and 3 new projects.
Transcript
Coming up in this episode of The Magic Book Podcast.
Margaret B. Steele [:I found the story of Milton Hudson Everett who played the role of Boomsky, Alexander Herrmann's slapstick assistant. This young 13-year-old kid who's picking cotton one day in the fields of Georgia and auditions for Alexander backstage before the show gets on the train that night, and never looks back.
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 Margaret Steele, a magician, musician, magic historian, and author. As the leading expert on the Herrmann dynasty of magicians, Margaret has been featured on The History Channel and lectured at the New York Historical Society as part of David Copperfield's Summer of Magic. In 2012, she published Adelaide Herrmann, Queen of Magic, bringing to light the long lost memoir of the pioneering performer. Focusing on a different aspect of the Herrmann's legacy, Margaret's latest book is "The Great Boomsky: The Many Lives of Magic's First Black Superstar." It's received widespread acclaim, and Margaret is the 2024 recipient of the Millbourne Christopher Literary Award.
Adrian Tennant [:Margaret, welcome to The Magic Book Podcast.
Margaret B. Steele [:Thanks so much, Adrian. I'm thrilled to be here.
Adrian Tennant [:You studied at the Juilliard School in New York and started your career as a professional musician. Can you tell us about your transition from music to magic?
Margaret B. Steele [:I would call it more of an expansion rather than a transition because I never stopped working as a musician. I actually pursued parallel careers as a musician and a magician for 20 years. My earliest shows were merging the two. I worked in music education with various symphony orchestras and especially their outreach ensembles in schools. So I performed probably dozens of of shows before I became mainly a children's entertainer. Anything you do in the arts, there's always very limited money. So in order to actually make a living, I had to, work commercially as a a party entertainer. I say I had to, but I loved it.
Margaret B. Steele [:So it's not like it was a a chore.
Adrian Tennant [:What was the first magic book you read?
Margaret B. Steele [:I can't remember. I had one magic book as a child, but I had no other way to learn magic. So my interest lay dormant until I was in my thirties, and I actually saw a performance by Jeff McBride, and that reignited my interest in magic. But at that time, when I didn't know any magicians, I thought that all magicians invented their own tricks. So my very first magic act was all magic that I had invented, and I was so surprised when I found out that it's all out there and you can buy books. And I bought a lot of books, but I bought them all at the same time, so I don't remember which I read first.
Adrian Tennant [:You've described your connection to Adelaide Herrmann as magical. I believe you're exactly 100 years younger than her within just a few weeks. How did you first discover Adelaide Herrmann?
Margaret B. Steele [:My introduction to Adelaide was, I call it a "Herrmann-ic" convergence! I had been searching for a role model for my whole career in magic, which had already been 12 years at that point in the year 2000. I'd done whatever research I knew how to do, and the only magic book about women at that time was Frances Marshall's "Those Glorious Dames." But Adelaide Herrmann had just one little paragraph in that book. So I knew her name, but I thought from that book she must be a lightweight. But I had such trouble finding a role model because starting later, I wasn't the ingenue. I couldn't perform like a Vegas showgirl-type act. Even younger, I couldn't have done that.
Margaret B. Steele [:I was looking for something more refined and more elegant, and I wasn't a comedy magician. So I really didn't have role models, so I developed my own act. And in the year 2000, I performed for the 75th anniversary of the Oakland Magic Circle. And after the show, this older gentleman came up to me with tears in his eyes, and he said, "I feel as though Adelaide Herrmann came back to life tonight to perform just for me." And I was shocked. This man was James Hamilton, who was the premier Herrmann scholar in the world, and I found out from him that I had basically replicated her act. The same same effects, similar costumes. I had reinvented the wheel on my own, and he had had many requests up to that point to open his research.
Margaret B. Steele [:But I was the first one he ever offered that to, and we became very close. We talked several times a week for 17 years until he passed away in 2017. We developed an act together. We worked very closely together, and we would talk on the phone for hours every week, and he called it "Herrmann-izing." And so much of my characterizations in my book come out of those conversations.
Adrian Tennant [:Professionally, of course, you're known for performing Cornucopia. Were you performing that before that chance encounter with James Hamilton, or was that something that came later?
Margaret B. Steele [:No. I was performing that before. I partnered with Eugene Berger on that effect. He suggested it to me. It was an effect he had always wanted to do. It's based on an act by a Finnish magician, Julius Sundman, that Eugene saw when Eugene was a teenage magician in Chicago. And he never forgot that trick, that, you know, explosive production of hundreds of silks from a paper cone. And Eugene had always entertained the idea of doing it himself, but then he realized it really wasn't something he was going to do.
Margaret B. Steele [:So he and I partnered on that. I developed my own method on it, but he helped me have the silks manufactured. And he found a video of Julius Sundman performing that Jay Marshall had in his collection. So that was in '95, I think, we did that. So that that predated by 5 years my discovery of Adelaide.
Adrian Tennant [:I recently reread "Herrmann The Magician: His Life, His Secrets," by H. J. Burlingame, which was published in 1897, the year after Alexander's death. Now in that book, Adelaide is mentioned only once very briefly despite her significant contributions to their performances. Margaret, to what do you attribute the omission?
Margaret B. Steele [:Sexism, pure and simple. You know, women were considered lesser then. Even now there are magicians who will tell you that they don't think women can do magic. I mean, I hope that's the minority now, but there was very little coverage of women in magic at that point or anybody who was not of the predominant magician class, which would be white men. Connie Boyd has an upcoming book with an entire chapter on the many female magicians who were omitted from the history books and why that was. So I'm really looking forward to seeing that, but it was very common. I'm surprised he even mentioned her once.
Adrian Tennant [:The search for Adelaide Herrmann's memoir took you 10 years. Now many other people would probably have just given up, so what motivated you to keep searching?
Margaret B. Steele [:Because I knew it existed. Magic historians had come to the conclusion that she just never wrote it. And, of course, that's very common in the magic world. People are supposedly writing a book and you never see it. So they decided that that was the case with her. But in my research, I knew it existed because I found examples of her reading from it. Members of the parent assembly would visit her in her suite at the Arlington Hotel, and she would read excerpts to them. And this was reported, so I knew she had written it.
Margaret B. Steele [:I didn't know if it still existed, but I wasn't gonna give up until I found it.
Adrian Tennant [:Adelaide presents a polished version of events in her memoir. How did you approach balancing her accounts with the newspaper stories about her more colorful episodes, shall we say?
Margaret B. Steele [:Yes. Well, it's 14 years later now, and I have a much greater perspective. And I now know that her memoir was far more burnished than I realized. So she wrote it for her legacy and the legacy especially of her husband, Alexander, what she wanted us to remember. And also, she had a her reputation in the magic world was, I don't know how to put this, not especially flattering. When I talked to Jim Steinmeyer after the memoir came out, he said, "This is the first thing I've ever read that makes her seem like a nice person." Now a lot of that is because as a woman in the entertainment world, she had to be tough. She had to be tough.
Margaret B. Steele [:Her male assistants many times did not respect her, did not listen to her instructions. As the head of a company, she had to deal with theater managers, and they didn't treat her well, So she had to be tough. There are a lot of female performers that have this reputation for being tough. Paul Daniels always used to talk about different performers who would be labeled difficult, and he would always say, "They just wanted to get it right!" So I've discovered so much more about her, the truth about her, and I'm preparing a new edition of her book with all different sorts of things in it, and that will address all of this much more specifically.
Adrian Tennant [:Fantastic. Margaret, your new book, "The Great Boomsky," grew out of your research on Alexander and Adelaide Herrmann. So what drew you to this particular story?
Margaret B. Steele [:I found this story very early on in my research. I found the story of Milton Hudson Everett, who played the role of Boomsky, Alexander Herrmann's slapstick assistant. And even without knowing anything that I further learned, it was already an incredible story. This young 13-year-old kid who's picking cotton one day in the fields of Georgia and auditions for Alexander backstage before the show, gets on the train that night and never looks back. I've learned so much more about him and so much more about the other adolescents who played Boomsky and then went on to major careers. But even without knowing that, this was already an incredible story. Even if I had never found anything else on him than what you can find in his extensive online paper trail in ancestry.com, newspapers.com, Adelaide's memoir, all of that was already a great story. And as I started researching it, it it just exploded into this much, much, much bigger story.
Margaret B. Steele [:So I've been researching Boomsky for let's see. I discovered Adelaide in the year 2000, so 24 years.
Adrian Tennant [:Wow. Well, for anyone who's not yet read the book, could you give us an overview of "The Great Boomsky"?
Margaret B. Steele [:Okay. Well, it's a 426 page book, so, it's very expansive, and it's about the young men who played the character of Boomsky, Alexander Herrmann's sidekick and the large number of them that went on to successful careers in in entertainment, in magic, comedy, music, but were never ever written about. So this is their story, but it's hung on the framework of the Herrmanns' tours.
Adrian Tennant [:Well, there's a lot in this book. But the thing that immediately struck me was the fact that you wrote the book as narrative nonfiction, which is somewhat unusual for magic history books. Margaret, what influenced your choice?
Margaret B. Steele [:Well, several things influenced this. Narrative nonfiction is maybe the fastest growing genre in literature right now, and it fills the gap between standard history writing and historical fiction. So narrative nonfiction is a true story that reads like a novel. It's a story that's spun onto a framework of facts. So everything in it is verified or at least possible, but the lanes are a little wider. So rather than saying "could've," "might've," "should've," perhaps, all of those things that slow down the narrative, I just go with it, and it's declarative with a disclaimer in the front that some of these stories, there's nothing in here that can't be true, but there are some things that are based on circumstantial evidence. And just my extreme exposure over all these years and all these speculative conversations with James Hamilton, There were two really strong reasons for using this genre. One is that my first draft of the book was a very standard history format, very, very standard history writing.
Margaret B. Steele [:And when I read it, I realized that even though the story was about Boomsky, he was always on the periphery, just as he was in all the writing about him, because he was never at the center of the narrative, partly because of the times he was in and partly because he was a supporting character. So in order to put him into the center of the story, I wrote the story from his perspective. Boomsky, when he's not actually actively doing something in the story, he's observing what's going on around him, and he's reacting. And that's how we get to know the Herrmanns, and that's also how we get to know him. So that was reason number one. And reason number two is that I think this is the first truly inclusive magic history where everybody's there. And I wanted to make my audience as inclusive as possible, so I wanted a really entertaining, fast moving, fun story because I think it's a such a great story. I already know that it's generating interest far beyond the magic world, and I wanted just to do these incredible characters justice.
Adrian Tennant [:If you're enjoying this episode of The Magic Book Podcast, please consider leaving a rating on Spotify or a review on Apple Podcasts. It can really help other people who share our interests discover the podcast. Thanks. Margaret, what challenges did you face in researching the different Boomskys that you introduce us to in the book?
Margaret B. Steele [:The biggest challenge was that this story happened during the era of segregation in America, and everything was segregated including the press. Certainly, the magic societies at that point did not allow African Americans. So it was very unusual at that time to find a story about African Americans that didn't include, you know, committing crimes or a flattering story, and they were just not included in those stories. So that was my biggest challenge was just finding references, but the biggest breakthrough, and it's been a breakthrough for many authors, is that the African American newspapers have now been digitized, and that's where all the information is. It was all put there. So now we can see it all. You may have noticed that there are all of these stories exploding in all different areas of African American history and and achievements and accomplishments. And that's absolutely the reason.
Margaret B. Steele [:This was not available to us for a century, and now all of a sudden it's right there.
Adrian Tennant [:As you mentioned, during the segregation era, the Herrmann show was notably integrated. How did you approach writing about the sensitive topics of segregation and racial discrimination in entertainment?
Margaret B. Steele [:This was a huge, huge challenge for me. And I'll tell you, I spent many, many days very jealous of all of the magic history writers who just could write their books and not have to deal with this. You know, some people put out two books, three books in the time that I was writing this book. So I really felt like I had two tigers by the tail, and I was constantly questioning myself that the two tigers that I had had by the tail were segregation and minstrelsy, two highly triggering topics and that had not been written about much in that era of entertainment. So I did so much self questioning. "Who am I to write this book?" And that self questioning was reinforced when I approached mainstream publishers who had no interest in publishing a book about black history written by a white author, certainly not in in this time. And I knew that I really had to approach this in the most sensitive way possible. And what I discovered as I researched how to do this was that people writing outside of their own culture use sensitivity readers, people that will help you, will will advise you.
Margaret B. Steele [:So my two main sensitivity readers for "The Great Boomsky" were Dale Penn, who was incredibly influential in inspiring me and cheerleading me on in this book, and Hiawatha, who ended up writing the foreword of the book. They didn't always agree. There were a couple of things they didn't agree on at all, but they opened my eyes. And Hiawatha especially, when he agreed to do this, he said, "I'm gonna tell you the truth." And I said, "That's what I want." And we spent hours and hours and hours on the phone as he went through line by line, and he would sometimes write in the margins "White eyes," because I was seeing things with white eyes. And, he would firmly but gently, not always that gently, advise me on how I was seeing it through wide eyes and how to change it. Sometimes it was just a word, just a a shade of meaning.
Margaret B. Steele [:Sometimes he was like, "This is outrageous. No!" But he helped me see through his eyes, and I say he made me honest. He made me approach this book in a way that's authentic and as truthful as I could do it.
Adrian Tennant [:Well, we'll come back to the foreword that Hiawatha wrote in just a moment. I'm curious, Margaret - how long did it take you to write "The Great Boomsky" from first outline to having the files ready to publish?
Margaret B. Steele [:James Hamilton passed away in 2017, and I inherited all his notes. He had been working on an extensive Herrmann book for many years, but he only managed to write about 30,000 words of it. He had two dying wishes. One was for me to finish his book. The other was to be buried next to the Herrmanns at Woodlawn Cemetery in New York, even though he had made no preparations. This is an aside, but I do consider that my greatest magic trick of all time because James Hamilton is buried right next to the Herrmanns at Woodlawn Cemetery in New York! But when I went to try to finish the book, I realized that James, he was an old-style gumshoe detective and had never warmed up to the Internet. So there was so much material.
Margaret B. Steele [:It was, like, half - only half the material. What he had was irreplaceable because he had gone to all of these places, and he'd spent 25 years doing this. So between his research and my research, I had what I needed to do a definitive Herrmann book. David Haversat and I published "The Herrmann Chronicles," published through his company 1868 Press, which is James Hamilton's manuscript edited by Michael Claxton with beautiful photos of James' collection. And by publishing that, I felt like I had fulfilled my promise to James. And then I took his research. Took me two years to organize it. So that took me to, 2019, and I'd been planning to write the book, and Dale Penn gave a brief presentation on Boomsky at the Magic Castle.
Margaret B. Steele [:And that was received so enthusiastically that I realized this story's out there. I'd better write it. So I started in February of 2019, and I worked - I thought it would take eight months. Took five years working full time. Five years! I still can't believe but once I was in it, I was in it. And so much of the information in it came after I started writing because I never stopped researching. So up until the very end, information was coming in, and it's still coming in.
Adrian Tennant [:Again, I feel like many people would just have given up. That's such an amazing achievement. What was the most unexpected or surprising revelation from your research for "The Great Boomsky"?
Margaret B. Steele [:It was absolutely the discovery of Isaac Willis, who worked as The Great Boomsky, an extremely successful and respected magician whose name was completely omitted from the magic literature during his time. The reason I hadn't found him was because he worked as The Great Boomsky in the world of Black minstrelsy from 1903 to 1905 before doing other things. And right at the time he began was when Milton Hudson Everett, the original Boomsky, in one of his misadventures - he had many misadventures. He had betrayed Adelaide by sealing her ring. And when he went to jail, she refused to bail him out, so he exposed all her methods and the press and went to jail for 18 months. And when he got out of jail, it was right at the time when The Great Boomsky started. So I thought, as did the few other Boomsky historians and researchers, that that was Milton Hudson Everett because the timing was just perfect. But it wasn't. It was actually Isaac Willis, and we have discovered later that Milton Hudson Everett went back to work with Adelaide.
Margaret B. Steele [:She took him back, and he was with her for the rest of her career. But that was a a big misunderstanding at first. So discovering Isaac Willis, The Great Boomsky, who retired to Canada, the discovery was also a "Herrmann-ic" convergence because my partner, Bruce McNabb, lives in Nova Scotia. He's the author of a Houdini book, "Metamorphosis: The Apprenticeship of Harry Houdini." And there was some I can't even remember now because you can backtrack and find lots of other references, but I can't remember the first reference to Boomsky being in Truro, Canada. But Bruce went to the library and found an address, and he went up to the place where Boomsky had lived, and he knocked on the door. And a woman answered, who happened to be Isaac Willis' granddaughter, who handed him an Isaac Willis pitch card, The Great Boomsky. And this whole world opened up, and this whole huge piece of history was restored.
Margaret B. Steele [:Isaac Willis and his wife, Blanche, that he met when he was on tour in 1905 in Nova Scotia, raised eight children and now they have over 300 living descendants. I think it's probably more like 400 now. And they are incredibly proud and they were extremely, extremely helpful in the writing of this book. And the book is actually dedicated to three of his granddaughters who helped me tremendously, but passed away before the book was published.
Adrian Tennant [:Margaret, do you typically undertake one-on-one interviews with folks as part of your research process?
Margaret B. Steele [:Oh, yes. Whenever possible.
Adrian Tennant [:And you tend to work from transcripts of the recordings, or how does that work for you?
Margaret B. Steele [:I'm more of a notetaker. I just moved and the piles of notebooks I have because I have this habit of taking notes on every single phone conversation I have. I've been to Nova Scotia many times, and I've been able to interview a lot of people face-to-face. Most of my interviews were conducted over the phone.
Adrian Tennant [:So do you scan your notes and bring them into the computer, or do you prefer to have your notes in an analog format and then do your writing on the computer?
Margaret B. Steele [:I write on the computer, but I just work from my handwritten notes. I'm not organized enough to create a database or anything like that. I wish I were because the way I wrote the book was from these giant wall calendars that I made for all of the years of the book. I made a page for every month from 1891 to 1909. And I wrote on the date that any newspaper article occurred, where they were, and that was incredibly helpful for finding, first of all, the timeline, but also finding these connections. For example, when Adelaide performed the same night in Scranton, Pennsylvania with Harry Keller and Howard Thurston at a different theater that's in a footnote, finding that two Boomskys in two different companies played on consecutive nights in Vancouver. Those kinds of things I found from these calendars.
Adrian Tennant [:I understand that you actually got to meet some of Isaac Willis' descendants in Canada. So can you tell us about that experience?
Margaret B. Steele [:I think it was 2016 that Bruce knocked on that door. And that February ... we call it Black History Month. They call it African Heritage Month in Canada ... we did a spread in the Halifax Chronicle Herald about Boomsky, which included interviews with the family, a piece by me, a piece by Bruce, and a piece by, Moses Bernard Phillips about minstrelsy. And that was really the beginning of connecting with the family. And in that time, I've connected with many family members. His grandchildren are older, so it was of urgent importance to interview as many of them as I can. I don't know all his grandchildren because there's so many, but I know probably 15 of them that I've talked to.
Margaret B. Steele [:And we had two book launches, one here in Peekskill, New York, where I'm located, and a few weeks later in Truro, at the fire hall in Truro, where you have your big events. And many, many family members came. Two of Isaac Willis' grandsons are wonderful musicians, the McCready Brothers, and they performed. They were just incredible, and it was just a wonderful, wonderful event. I'm still working on editing the video, but the video will be put up on my website, TheGreatBoomsky.com, as soon as I can do it. But it's very rare in the magic history world that you have actual descendants of people, and actual descendants who preserved the history. So this was very, very special, and, you know, I communicate with them whenever I can, and I call them. But when you call Nova Scotia with a out of area area code, they don't pick up.
Margaret B. Steele [:So you have to so you have to email them first!
Adrian Tennant [:And what's it like for them seeing this renewed interest in their grandfather?
Margaret B. Steele [:They're so proud. They're so proud of him, and they, you know, they they don't mind the attention they're getting. It's wonderful. He and his wife, Blanche, built a house up the hill from downtown Truro. He worked as a railway porter in his later life, and they had a beautiful piece of property that was large enough to have some farm animals and gardens. He died young. He died at age 53 in in 1933, but his wife lived until 1971. And the property was divided up, and his children built small houses on the property, and several of his grandchildren still live on the on the original property.
Adrian Tennant [:You can be notified when new episodes of this podcast are published either by signing up on the website at TheMagicBookPodcast.com or by following the Facebook page. Thanks. Well, in his foreword to "The Great Boomsky," Hiawatha states that the book is a story about transformation describing not only the journey of the main characters, but also your journey as its author. So Margaret, in what ways were you transformed by the writing of the book?
Margaret B. Steele [:I was hugely transformed. Just it's indescribable how much writing this book changed me. I grew up in a racist part of the US. I grew up in Virginia and South Carolina, and I was horrified by some of the things I saw and heard, and I always considered myself the opposite. You know, "I'm not racist." You think that about yourself, but what I learned is that we all have implicit bias. You know? We all have these things that we just don't know about how we perceive things. And Hiawatha put it front and center in front of me, but not just him, Dr. Lynn Jones, who's an activist in Canada.
Margaret B. Steele [:Canada's a little different. Their African history is was a little different, so she helped me see it from her perspective. One of the most helpful things I read was a book called, "White Like Me," by Tim Wise, which is all about white privilege and implicit bias, and I never understood the extent to which my privilege affects me every single day. So I hope that this message comes through in the book. So I'm I'm hoping that "The Great Boomsky" is stealthily educational in that way and others.
Adrian Tennant [:Margaret, how has your experience as a performer influenced your approach to writing about magic?
Margaret B. Steele [:That is a fantastic question. We write what we know. So I know performing, and I know touring. And this book is really a book about touring. And I've experienced so many different aspects of touring and performing. I've been in the spotlight. I've been in the orchestra pit, and I've been in the boxes. So I know what that's like.
Margaret B. Steele [:I've done all kinds of tours. I've done first class tours. I've done really bad tours. I've done small tours with, you know, four or five people. I've done big tours with 70 people in Broadway show companies. I did five tours of China and Arnie Kolodner's illusion show, which had nine illusions in it, and I did five of them. So one thing you learn from that is that all tours have commonalities. They're all like a family.
Margaret B. Steele [:Sometimes it's a very dysfunctional family, but it's like a family. When you're out in all these unfamiliar places, you find yourself looking for your tourmates because they're what you know. When you finish a tour when I finished a tour, for several weeks, I would be looking around me trying to find my tourmates because it was such a habit. They are all like a family. They all have catch phrases, stories, and there's always hanky panky. So I brought that experiences to this book, and I hope it shows through. And I want it to to feel real, and I hope it does because it's based in my real experiences.
Adrian Tennant [:I absolutely got that flavor. A revelation for me was definitely the history of the touring minstrel shows. Now there were many Boomskys. We've talked about two of them. How many were there in total?
Margaret B. Steele [:We don't know exactly how many there were. There were at least 15, but some only lasted a day. One of them in the book only lasted a little while, Irving Jones, but he went on to become the most famous Boomsky of all as far as mainstream entertainment. He wrote over a 100 published songs, that were performed by people as famous as George M. Cohan. But we really don't know exactly how many because Boomsky was never listed in the program. And until Leon Herrmann listed Boomsky, and he said Boomsky was played by himself. So that was the first time. But many of them became part of the crew as well.
Margaret B. Steele [:So Milton Hudson Everett was a property manager. Another one was assistant stage manager. So that's where you find them. And when you go and research all these names, that's how you start finding the connections. Another big challenge was that Boomsky was only named Boomsky in 1891 when Milton Hudson Everett joined the company, but Herrmann had been using Black assistants for ten years by then. But when he came up with the name Boomsky, it stuck, and it was so memorable that from that point on, both Herrmann and all of the young men who had played the character referred to themselves as Boomsky retroactively. That was very confusing for a very long time, because you won't find any references to Boomsky before 1891. But the character was developed by Alexander Herrmann in his childhood, the beginnings of the character.
Margaret B. Steele [:But he had been using Black assistants for ten years by then. So I'm hoping I know I know that we'll find more, but, I found what I could. Found the ones I could.
Adrian Tennant [:Water-to-Wine and The Linking Rings appear frequently in all the Boomskys' performances. What made these particular effects significant, do you think?
Margaret B. Steele [:In these giant touring minstrel shows that played opera houses and mainstream venues in the heyday of Black minstrelsy, which was from about 1900 to 1910, all of these magicians found work in these companies. And, you know, these were big commercially successful companies, and they had 70, 80 people in these companies. They traveled in private railcars, and the minstrel shows were so packed with entertainment that there was one section that was called the olio, which was the variety performer section, but they only had a tiny little chunk of time to perform. So they performed tricks that were easy to set up, and they were quick. With the Water-to-Wine, I don't know if they played it with a religious significance or not. They were all churchgoing Christians, so that's possible. And there were some venues where they were not allowed to perform Water-to-Wine because of its religious connotation, so they performed Water-to-Ink instead.
Adrian Tennant [:Well, Adelaide Herrmann performed until age 74, despite friends urging her to retire. Now when we were preparing for this interview, you mentioned to me that ageism has been as significant a challenge for women in magic as sexism. Can you elaborate on that?
Margaret B. Steele [:Yes. While the world in general is ageist, especially for women, and especially in magic. Female magicians traditionally have had a very short shelf life and short careers, and this cuts the legacy of women in magic off at the knees. Every new generation thinks they're the first. I thought, you know, "Oh, there are no no women magicians here, so, oh, you know, it's a wide open field. I discovered this. How about that?" But, no, it's been discovered over and over and over, but every generation thinks they're the first. But because of that, there's no continuation, no no legacy, no building upon what's come before. Everybody's reinventing the wheel.
Margaret B. Steele [:Rosemary Reid has done these surveys of women in magic, and she had this meeting of it was a it was on Zoom. And over and over, the women all talked about how they had to convert everything they learned from being written for men to adapt it to themselves. And everybody was doing the same thing, so that, in my opinion, keeps women from being able to advance in magic. I'm going to be writing about this a lot. It's probably gonna be controversial. I'm going to be writing about this, and I also have my own ideas of how to start solving this. As far as the legacy, I don't know. I can't solve ageism, but I have ideas for at least creating a legacy so we're not all starting from scratch every time we, you know, get interested in magic.
Adrian Tennant [:You described that in The History Channel segment, I think.
Margaret B. Steele [:"Magic has a woman problem." Of everything I've ever said, that comes back to me. I see that everywhere. Every time I'm quoted, it's "Magic has a woman problem," Margaret Steele. So might as well go with it. It's already out there. So
Adrian Tennant [:As both a performer and historian, what magic book or books do you cherish the most in your own collection?
Margaret B. Steele [:Oh, I can't narrow that down too much because there are so many. Of course, Eugene Burger's books, they were incredibly influential on me as was Eugene. He was one of my wonderful mentors. And as far as magic history books, I love the touring books. I love "Illusion Show," by David Bamberg. I love "Milo and Roger." They are, I think, are very close to what I'm trying to do, which is put you there, traveling with them in in their shows. And, of course, Jim Steinmeyer's books are the gold standard for this kind of a magic history writing that appeals to a larger audience beyond the magic world.
Adrian Tennant [:You founded Floating Lady Publishing to publish "The Great Boomsky." So, Margaret, why did you decide to go the indie publishing route this time?
Margaret B. Steele [:I started writing with no idea how I was going to publish this book. I thought I was writing a book, but what I realized is that you write a manuscript, you publish a book. They're two very different things. As I approached and was approached by traditional publishers, I realized that wasn't going to work for me. Traditional publishing used to be the only game in town, and that's how you had to publish. You had to have somebody publish your book. But traditional publishing has never been a good deal for authors. It's always been a raw deal for authors because publishing contracts, you give away your rights.
Margaret B. Steele [:Even though you're giving the publisher print rights, they also take your e-book rights, your audiobook rights, your movie rights, your translation rights, everything. And you don't even have any control over your content, your cover, the title. You've given all of that away. And you get royalties, but they're usually small. They didn't want me, and I realized I didn't want them. And several magic publishers offered to publish my book and, you know, very, very respected magic publishers, but I knew this book had potentially greater reach beyond the magic world. I started studying publishing, and I learned that there's a difference between what we call self-publishing and indie publishing. Indie publishing is professional self-publishing.
Margaret B. Steele [:It's publishing at the standard of traditional publishing so that you can compete in the mainstream. And I joined a group that has been tremendously helpful to me. It's called the Alliance of Independent Authors or ALLi. That's the the acronym. And they have guided me and helped me through every part of this process. This is the golden age of publishing now, of indie publishing. Now indie authors make more than traditionally published authors. They make more money than traditionally published authors.
Margaret B. Steele [:And the stigma, there was a stigma against books that were not traditionally published, but that's no longer the case at all because the quality has improved, the quality of printing, because indie books are usually print on demand. And when that began, the quality wasn't so good, but it's indistinguishable now. And many mainstream publishers are using print on demand also. Now indie books are accepted for all major awards, all major reviews. Even the Pulitzer Prize is open to indie authors now. Not there's not an indie published book yet that's won a Pulitzer Prize, but there have been nominees. So once I started examining this and learning about it, there was just no no question I was going to do it this way. And I consider it really one of the greatest decisions of my life.
Margaret B. Steele [:I love being in control of everything. I got to choose the cover. I chose everything. I I chose. It was all up to me. I'm the boss. There's no middleman. With my first publisher, I bought back the rights for the Adelaide Herrmann book.
Margaret B. Steele [:There was one standout time when I had book to talk at MagiFest. I had for weeks been calling my publisher saying, "I need books. I need books. I need books." And he didn't get back to me, and I drove nine hours to Columbus with, like, six books to sell, and I had a line out the door. So that's never gonna happen because I'm the boss.
Adrian Tennant [:Mhmm. Love that. Which seems like a great time to ask, if people don't yet have their copy of "The Great Boomsky," where can they purchase it?
Margaret B. Steele [:It's everywhere. The best place the most advantageous place for me is through my website, TheGreatBoomsky.com. I have a direct link, and I offer a discount, a $5 discount on both the hardcover and the softcover. Magic history books are so expensive usually, and I wanted to make this affordable. So the retail price on the hardcover deluxe full color edition is $55, but it's $50 on my website. And the softcover is $32, but it's $27 on my website. And the e-book is $9.99 everywhere. It's also on Amazon.
Margaret B. Steele [:And if you do buy it on Amazon, please leave a review, a good review. Thank you. And if you like it but you can get it anywhere. It's at Barnes and Noble. It's at Walmart. It's almost all the e-book distributors, and that's because through my affiliation with ALLi, the Alliance of Independent Authors, I learned how to market, and I learned how to get my book out there.
Adrian Tennant [:As you reflect on your experience, not just with "The Great Boomsky," but with the Adelaide Herrmann memoir beforehand, what advice would you give to others interested in researching and writing about magic history?
Margaret B. Steele [:Well, I love research. I love going down those Internet rabbit holes. I go down rabbit holes so deep that I have to make note of every step because I would never find this again if I didn't if I didn't do it. So I think if you want to write magic history, you already love research. So what I'm planning on doing when things calm down is I want to mentor people both in publishing and research. I'm planning to do a YouTube tutorial series called, "Magic History Research 101." It's more than just a a one episode-type thing. I mean, each episode will cover how to do newspapers.com, ancestry.com, chronicling America through the Library of Congress, which is a free service at which has different newspapers than newspapers.com.
Margaret B. Steele [:And, of course, Ask Alexander. That's your first step. But it's surprising to me how many magic books are written just using magic world sources and not accessing the larger world, which is where you find out so much more about these incredible characters.
Adrian Tennant [:Finally, are you working on any other projects that you're able to share with us?
Margaret B. Steele [:I have three more books planned with Floating Lady Publishing, And what's interesting is how many people are asking me to publish their books. It would be more advantageous for me than it would be for them. But what I'm really trying to do is mentor people in indie publishing because that's the best way to publish your book. It's the best way to have a continuing income and be able to control the trajectory of your book. My next book that I'm actively working on now is the new edition of Adelaide Herrmann's memoir, and I've got about 20 percent new material, much of which came from the research for Boomsky. And many of the stories that are going to be in this new volume, I had originally had in Boomsky, but they were just not Boomsky-focused. They were Adelaide-focused.
Margaret B. Steele [:So I pulled them out, and they're going to go into the the memoir. And the new book is going to be structured differently with sidebars with my information alongside of Adelaide's memoir so that you can choose to read what she left out and what she maybe distorted a little bit or not because it'll be a sidebar. So if you wanna just go straight through and read it, but, otherwise, you can read the sidebars. A lot of new images also. So I'm really excited about that, but I'm not gonna give a date because I did that before, and I missed my over and over because it takes always takes longer than you think. But there's a lot of demand, and also that book is not available right now. So I wanna get it back. It was never marketed properly.
Margaret B. Steele [:The publisher refused to do an index. He refused to do an e-book. He refused to put my name on the cover. So my name will be on the cover. So there's that number one. Number two is a book with a working title of "Femme Magic," which is going to be a book for magicians. It's going to be classic and original routines adapted for how women think, dress, and move. So that's going to be the thing about not having to reinvent the wheel.
Margaret B. Steele [:It's going to be all the things that I have learned about costuming and techniques. And, you know, women can get away with so much more than men because we have such variety in costuming, but also women sit differently than men. You know, and all of that all of that can be used. I've already got a lot of notes on that, but, again, that's gonna be ... I mean, I just have to live long enough for all of this! And then I'm working on a memoir also, my own memoir, because I've encountered some pretty interesting characters and done some pretty interesting stuff. So, you know, I don't know if anybody will be that interested in it, but it'll at least be out there. And then after I produce three more books, I might actually, you know, have, like, a little bit of retirement. I don't know.
Margaret B. Steele [:We'll see. Maybe not.
Adrian Tennant [:I think retirement's overrated for somebody with your energy, Margaret. I'm excited about all your projects. It sounds like we'll have a nice pipeline for future episodes of The Magic Book Podcast! Margaret, thank you so much for being my guest on The Magic Book Podcast.
Margaret B. Steele [:Thank you so much, Adrian. You have the best questions of anybody I've ever been interviewed by, and any one of these questions could have been a whole episode. So I really appreciate your having me. Thank you so much.
Adrian Tennant [:You've been listening to The Magic Book Podcast. In this episode, Margaret shared her remarkable journey from discovering Adelaide Herrmann's lost memoir to uncovering the untold story of The Great Boomsky. We learned how Margaret's background as a touring performer brought unique insights to her historical research, allowing her to capture the authentic experience of life on the road with a magic show. Her meticulous research helps restore important voices to the historical record - from Adelaide Herrmann's groundbreaking career to the fascinating lives of the many performers who portrayed The Great Boomsky. Margaret's decision to establish Floating Lady Publishing signals an exciting new chapter in how magic stories will be preserved and shared. 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 book Margaret mentioned. If you have a question or would like to suggest a topic for a future episode, please contact me, Adrian@TheMagicBookPodcast.com. Thank you for listening to The Magic Book Podcast.
Adrian Tennant [:I've been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next time, goodbye.
