David Copperfield Visits the Dallas Magic Club

Our club’s brush with fame

The Dallas Magic Club is about to celebrate our 100th birthday, and over all those years, we have been fortunate to have had guests, lecturers, performers, and friends who are some of magic’s best and most well-known magicians in the industry…the famous and the infamous! As this milestone birthday approaches, we thought it would be nice to re-visit some of those visitors and their moments in time with the DMC. This month we look at the most commercially successful magician in the world, David Copperfield, and his unconventional visit with the DMC.

On March 13, 2020, our country was literary shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Students were sent home from school, and employees were told to work from home. Federal, state, county and local governments determined which types of businesses were essential so that we wouldn’t have to completely stop our way of life. Handshakes and hugs were a thing of the past, and hand sanitizer and masks were in our foreseeable future.

So, what does a magic club do when the government says not to hold in-person public meetings with groups of over ten people? The board officers got on a conference call and discussed what options we might have. A Zoom call was considered, but first many of us had to first be educated on how a Zoom call actually works! By March 15, 2020, our club president at the time, Dal Sanders, sent an email to the entire board with the recommendation we move forward with an online meeting. In the March 2020 Wizard’s Scroll, it says regarding our program for that month’s meeting, “March is our chance to do something different…very different. Tonight we are going to do our March meeting online.” This was a whole new world for the DMC…really it was a whole new way of life for everyone and everything in the world.

We made it through the March meeting online and we thought by April all this pandemic stuff would be behind us…we were wrong! While this was challenging, the board did not want our club to not have our monthly meetings; and so, the DMC was one of the first magic clubs, if not the first, to move their meetings online during the pandemic. Our attitude was that when you get lemons, you make lemonade.

I knew we had to make those online meetings meaningful and interesting; and as the vice president and program director in the beginning months of COVID-19, I had to come up with something special…so why not ask David Copperfield to visit the club!
I reached out to David, and he graciously agreed to Zoom in from his home in Summerlin, Nevada and attend our April 21, 2020, meeting and talk about his magic collection. He talked to the club about his passion for magic and some interesting facts about his museum, The International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts.

David Copperfield in zoom meeting with Dallas Magic Club in 2020 during Covid-19 shutdown

David shared with the club members how he got started collecting magic and his vast collection of Harry Houdini books and illusions. At the time, one of his more recent acquisitions was the bookshelves from Houdini’s home in New York City. He had them completely restored to their former glory, and Houdini’s books are back at home in their original bookshelves. He also shared a little about the “secret” entrance to the museum and where he came up with the idea.

When David was asked about his most prized magical possession, he mentioned his Guinness World Records, his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, his knighthood by the French government, and how he had been named a Living Legend by the U.S. Library of Congress; but after an little encouragement, he agreed his most prized possession is the proclamation hanging in the museum naming him an adopted citizen of the great city of Wylie, Texas (I wonder who prompted him to say that?)!!

The International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts is one of the world’s largest collections of the history of the art of magic. It was founded by David in 1991 after he purchased the Mulholland Library of the Conjuring and the Allied Arts. The collection expanded with his acquisition of the Cole Collection totaling 5,000 cubic feet of magic-related documents and artifacts. Today, the collection contains over 80,000 pieces, including magic books, props, illusions, thousands of graphic images, prints, posters, playbills, photographs, manuscripts, letters, and scrapbooks of leading magicians throughout the years.

Some items included in the museum:

Automata built by Robert Houdin.
Professor Hoffmann’s props for the cup and balls.
Houdini’s Metamorphosis Trunk.
Okito’s Floating Ball.
Channing Pollock props used in his Ed Sullivan Show act.
The turban owned by Alexander.
Cardini’s tuxedo, monocle and props.
Chung Ling Soo’s rifle.
Dante’s Spirit Cabinet.
The first edition of Scott’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft, published in 1584.

It is, without question, a magical place.
There are few magicians alive today that are as well-known or as dedicated to their craft as David Copperfield. With a 40-year career, 21 Emmy Award wins and 11 Guinness World Records, it’s no surprise that Copperfield has become a fixture in the Las Vegas performance pantheon, grossing over a billion dollars in ticket sales. That success lies in his ability to make the impossible happen, whether that’s surviving a fall over Niagara Falls, floating over the Grand Canyon, making the Statue of Liberty disappear, or now for all of us waiting to see what he will do with the moon!

When asked why he had created this space and accumulated such a vast collection, he says, “The people whose shoulders I stand upon, the Houdinis, the Kellars and the Thurstons, of course I want to honor them, so I created this museum, which we are continuing to expand,” Copperfield says. “We tell stories their stories that are very beautiful about hope and inspiration. People walk out very changed.”

Here is a little peek of all the magical treasures within the walls of The International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts.

The COVID-19 pandemic impacted our lives in many different ways, but fortunately the DMC continued to thrive through those tough times, and we were able to hear and learn from some of the greats in the magic community!

Just another example of how the Dallas Magic Club has continually focused on what we can do…and not on what we can’t do…over our 100-year history.