CHICAGO – At its December 9 Select Secrets sale, Potter & Potter Auctions reclaimed the world auction record for any magic poster, tallied a total of $720,000, and enjoyed a 99.3 percent sell-through rate. Complete results for the sale are available at LiveAuctioneers.
The top lot was the new record-holder: a 1908 one sheet-color stone lithograph poster showing Harry Houdini in the process of performing his famed Milk Can Escape. It touted the feat loudly and proudly, calling it ‘Houdini’s Death-Defying Mystery’ and warning ‘Failure Means a Drowning Death.’ Estimated at $40,000-$60,000, it hammered for $150,000 and sold for $180,000 with buyer’s premium.
The sum bests a record set in October 2021 at Sotheby’s sale of the Ricky Jay Collection, which included a circa-1913-1915 poster showing a tight shot of Houdini’s grimacing face and his crooked right arm as he floated upside-down in a water tank during another of his famed escapes. It, too, was estimated at $40,000-$60,000 and sold for $151,200.
Prior to the Sotheby’s sale, Potter & Potter had claimed the world auction record with a 1912 version of the Harry Houdini water tank escape poster that shows him in full, with his feet sticking out of the top of the padlocked tank. Offered in February 2017, it sold for $95,000 ($114,000 with buyer’s premium).
The Houdini poster was not the only one on offer that turned in an impressive performance. A 1908 Howard Thurston poster showing him literally inheriting the mantle of the magician Kellar as a devil-like figure looks on, estimated at $15,000-$25,000, sold for $40,000 ($48,000 with buyer’s premium).
All seven lots of material relating to the woman magician Suzy Wandas (born Jeanne Van Dyk, 1896-1986) found new homes, with most selling above their estimates and a few within their estimates. Outpacing the rest was a lot consisting of her performing props and almost everything she used in her stage act. These included pails, holders, metal stands, a vanishing cane and an appearing cane, palming coins, multiplying billiard balls, her make-up bag and makeup, silks and flags, dummy cigarettes and gimmicked matchboxes, a breakaway fan, and playing cards. An unnamed Potter & Potter expert called the lot “a remarkable time capsule of one of the few female performers to excel as a variety artist in the twentieth century as a magician – not to mention as part of a family act, on circus, and as a musician, on two sides of the Atlantic.” Estimated at $5,000-$8,000, this Suzy Wandas lot sold for $32,000 ($38,400 with buyer’s premium).
