Houdini's Library: A magician's archive in Austin

Austin has a rare chance to get close to the man who made escaping the impossible look easy. The Harry Ransom Center is running "Houdini's Library," an exhibition built around Harry Houdini's personal archives, and it's on at the University of Texas at Austin through Sunday, January 24. It opened back on Saturday, August 29, so there's plenty of time to catch it before the end of the month.

The show marks the centenary of Houdini's death in 1926 and pulls from a collection the Ransom Center has held since 1958. It's not just a collection of magic props, though there are plenty of those; it's really about the intersection of magic, history, and the act of collecting. Among the items on display is a first edition of Reginald Scot's 1584 classic "The Discoverie of Witchcraft," a foundational work that challenged the existence of witchcraft and the persecution of the accused, alongside the handwritten travel diary of the legendary English actor David Garrick, who wrote it during a 1751 trip to Paris.

For anyone who only knows Houdini as the guy who could get out of anything, the backstory here is worth knowing. Born Ehrich Weiss on March 24, 1874, in Budapest, then part of Austria-Hungary, to a Jewish family, he became the American escapologist and illusionist the world remembers. He died on October 31, 1926, at the age of 52, from peritonitis, which may have been linked to appendicitis and punches to his abdomen he took from Jocelyn Gordon Whitehead at the Princess Theatre in Montreal on October 22. He was operated on on October 25 and died in Detroit, Michigan. The exhibition, organized by Dr. Eric Colleary, the Cline Curator of Theatre and Performing Arts at the Ransom Center, uses these archives to trace the life of the man behind the stage name.

Planning a visit is straightforward. The center's general gallery hours are Tuesday through Sunday, 10am to 5pm, and admission is free, which is a nice plus for a show this deep. If you'd rather have someone walk you through it, there's a public tour schedule: the center is closed on Mondays, tours run at noon Tuesday through Friday, and there are 1pm and 2pm slots on Saturday and Sunday. The Harry Ransom Center itself is a research library and museum at the University of Texas at Austin, known for rare books, manuscripts, and cultural artifacts, and it holds 36 million literary manuscripts, one million rare books, five million photographs, and more than 100,000 works of art. It was established in 1957, moved to its current building in 1972, and took its current name in 1983. "Houdini's Library" is a great excuse to spend an afternoon there, and with the exhibition running until late January, there's no real rush to squeeze it in this weekend.