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Potter & Potter's Retail Store. Shop now for vintage magic, gambling, circus, and oddities. Our inventory includes used, rare, and out-of-print books, along with vintage magic posters, photographs, magic tricks, playing cards, and more.
Photography & Ephemera
NOVEMBER 20, 2021 • This sale features a diverse array of photographs and printed ephemera - include mugshots, baseball ephemera, books, over 100,000 vintage postcards in a large range of categories, and an important and substantial session of vintage and modern photography. Items include the work of Chicago photographer Vivian Maier, an enormous archive of glass plate negatives, and associated memorabilia.
Salon de Magie • The Klosterman Collection • Part I
OCTOBER 30, 2021 • Potter and Potter is pleased to announce the first sale from Ken Klosterman's world famous collection of Magicana. Highlights will include The Light and Heavy Chest of Robert-Houdin, T. Nelson Downs' own Coin Ladder, and the Houdini Upside Down in the Water Torture Cell poster. A deluxe cloth bound catalog has been produced and is now available for purchase.
Fall Magic Auction • Online-Only
SEPTEMBER 11, 2021 • Our September magic auction featured a strong selection of antiquarian titles from the library of Giovanni "Roxy" Pasqua, the sale included works from the seventeenth century to the present day, among them classics by Bosco, modern presentation copies and deluxe editions, and related works. The books and manuscripts were complemented by a diverse array of collectable and performable magic apparatus, posters, and printed ephemera.
Upcoming Auction
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Download PDFSalon de Magie • The Klosterman Collection Part I
Potter and Potter is pleased to announce the first sale from Ken Klosterman's world famous collection of magicana, The Salon de Magie, on October 30, 2021. Filled with historically-significant ephemera, books, and apparatus, the collection was developed over the course of five decades and is made up of many truly important relics from the careers of Robert-Houdin, Houdini, Chung Ling Soo, Harry Kellar, and their contemporaries. In addition, the Salon held fine examples from the great craftsmen of the "golden age" of magic apparatus manufacturing: Thayer, Willmann, Conradi, Klingl, Abbott, and their peers.
An exhibition and pre-sale cocktail party will be conducted in our Chicago gallery on October 28, from 6pm to 9pm, with regular exhibition hours in the gallery both on the 28th and 29 from 10am to 5pm.
Highlights in every collecting category will be part of this historic sale. Among the featured lots are The Light and Heavy Chest of Robert-Houdin, T. Nelson Downs' own Coin Ladder, and a rare half-sheet lithograph of Houdini upside down in the Water Torture Cell.
The deluxe clothbound auction catalog - printed in a strictly limited quantity - is now available for purchase for $55.00.
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Photography & Ephemera
Highlights of our November sale - which features a diverse array of photographs and printed ephemera - include mugshots, baseball ephemera, books, over 100,000 vintage postcards in a large range of categories, and an important and substantial session of vintage and modern photography. The latter category includes the work of Chicago photographer Vivian Maier (including a personal album of twenty-two images captured on her travels abroad), an enormous archive of glass plate negatives, and associated memorabilia. A substantial US and worldwide stamp collection, individual sets, airmails, and covers (including examples from the American Civil War), will also be featured.
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December Magic Auction
Our December sale features the collection of Bob Rossi. While Mr. Rossi was an ardent collector of books and manuscripts, his main focus was memorabilia from the career of Joseph Dunninger, the "master mind of modern mystery." Rossi's collection includes extra-illustrated books from Dunninger's library, along with association copies of his own books, a range of works on spiritualism, witchcraft, and conjuring, as well as large archives of ephemera and memorabilia from Dunninger's own files, as well as his career. Among the highlights are the Houdini forcing bible, inscribed by Houdini to Dunninger. A strong offering of posters, apparatus, and associated ephemera will round out the auction.