Worth Revisiting: A mentalist’s scrapbook of his trade

The Library of Congress’s Bibliomania blog profiles George Newmann, a mentalist and hypnotist who collected books about magic and related practices. The post turns its attention to the scrapbooks he assembled from newspaper and magazine clippings.

Newmann organized his finds by subject and added indexes, contents pages and introductions. The blog also compares his own expansive descriptions of his library with the surviving documentation, a reminder that the history of a collection includes the way its owner promoted it.

Why it matters

The scrapbooks preserve a performer’s view of how magic, mentalism and hypnotism circulated in print, alongside a useful lesson in checking a collector’s claims.