I hope this is a topic that performers and collectors alike can weigh in on.

Over a decade ago, Bob Lund, a highly-respected collector, spoke to members of the Magic Collectors' Association. He made several observations, one of which is summarized below through the following excerpts:

"Collectors are not very important in my view of the world.
The real thing, if you have an interest in magic, is to be
a performer. The performer is everything and the only thing
and all else is imitation of life, all else is second best...
Has collecting been given a stature, has it attained an
acceptance ... where the passive viewer regards himself as
the equal of the active performer? Magicians are the only
first-class citizens in our small world and the rest of us
are second-class and that is the best that can be said about us.

Do you agree with Bob?

I think Bob was narrow-minded in his generalization, even if he was speaking as a collector. Generalizations tend to destroy effective communication rather than enhance it. I think he forgot that there are many niches in our "small world." Full-time performers, part-time performers, professionals, amateurs, collectors, historians, creators, inventors, lovers, haters, fans, fanatics, etc. We all have our niche and we all make our contributions, successful or otherwise. Anybody that gives me the "upper-class lower-class" BSstuff...I'll tell them to stick it in their ear.

For me, this goes across the board, and isn't limited to the Magic Community. For me, this reaches the Human Condition and then some.

No, Clay. I don't agree at all.

I never met Bob Lund. I wish I had. I understand that he had some major insights into collecting.

Certainly, Bob is right to the point that the only face the public sees on magic is that of the performer. But if it weren't for the inventor, the performer would have nothing to do. Let's face it. Few performers are inventors. Some have ideas, but not the mechanical skills to pull of the construction of a really dynamite piece. And if it weren't for Johnny Gaughan, Jim Steinmeyer, Bill Schmelk and Norm Nielsen, most of the acts in Las Vegas would be without props.

And all of these guys are collectors.

The collector is the steward of the craft. He takes those battered old props, nurses them back to health and puts them on display for others to see. He salvages the manuscripts. He researches provenances.

So while he may do a lot of scut work, he, in a way, is equally important.

Maybe Bob was jealous.

The collectors also preserve our history. Imagine if there were no coin collections, stamp collections, museums (collections of various things). Collectors are very important to our art. As Bill stated, I am a performer and not a builder. I'm also not a historian. I depend on all of these disciplines to make me a better performer.

What Bob really meant was that in our small
world there are only a hand full of really
exceptional magicians who did it as a living,
full time, were they were performers, historians,
and collectors of knowledge.. .

When he said that, it was back in
the '70's. I remember hearing that. He
had the utmost respect for the magicians
at the time that did it full-time when
there really were only hand full.

He was a collector a preserver of magic,
but what good it is it to collect when you
don't know how to really perform the trick?
Knowing how the person who either invented it
or made it become what it is today.

I remember visiting the museum when I was
young. I remember meeting Bob, and he was
always so wonderful to us. Letting in the
museum on days when they weren't ever open.

He loved the idea that one can understand
the value of magic history but perform in
on the level that makes it professional.

Sometimes it takes a performer, historian
and a collector to be a great magician. And
when I say a collector, collecting knowledge
and stuff that is personal to your own magic
history, that is around you and affects you
and your knowledge as a performer and magician.
Not just anything that you feel has value. But
adds value to your act.

When you are all three that makes you a first
class magician in all worlds. That's why he loved us
so very much. I only have what was given to me
from my fathers history in magic saved through
my mother. I will preserve it and enjoy it and
pass the knowledge down to other people.

However, if I were to fully pursue magic in the
future I will never be as a great as my dad.

So yes, I do agree with him.

Bob was very dear to me as was a surrogate father for me in my 'tween years.

Bob was a skilled writer (he wrote an automotive column for 'Popular Mechanics' for several years), and a talented wordsmith. His use of generalizations speaks more to universal themes and ideas and less to specific condemnations.

The gist of his statements above is that without the magician to perform the effects, there would be nothing to collect and that the service the magician performs for society, is superior to that of the archivist/collector.

This was typical of Bob's humility and humanity.

It depends on the collector.

If you are going to collect for the sake of collecting, shoving your assets into a dusty room, never to see the light of day then you are not giving much back to the art. If instead, you are nursing props back to health, displaying, researching, and sharing, then indeed your role is anything but second class.

The same can be said for magicians. The second/third rate ones steal others material, buy up standard effects and perform them badly with little regard for art, exposing them in the process.

So, the guy giving the lecture is really talking rubbish, judged by this extract, as he spoke without qualifying his terms. Maybe he did qualify in the complete transcript. That's the danger of posting excerpts and halfquotes.

Bob was correct in that, without the performer the trick would have little or no meaning at all. I think it is the performer who makes the trick desirable in the first place.

Thanks Kenn, It helps us to know some about the writer and the context when it comes to interpreting the writing.

"Thanks Kenn, It helps us to know some about the writer and the context when it comes to interpreting the writing."

OK

Agreed that the performer is who makes the items collectable, and that the collector is the person collecting. And, without the performer, the items would/may not be considered collectables. Simple enough.

Why didn't Bob Lund just say that in the first place? Why did he cloud his communication with references to first-class and second-class citizens? What was he really trying to say?

Thanks to all of you for some thoughtful posts. I posted this question because I am writing a “rebuttal” to Bob’s statements, but felt that some input from others might provide some broader perspective. A few thoughts in response ...

At the outset, I must confess that providing the full text of any potentially controversial statement or topic is always better for meaningful dialogue. But I didn’t have the time to type in 2,000 words of text. I’m glad that some of you who responded knew Bob and were able to put what he said into some context. All of the things that have been said about Bob’s character in this post are true based on my experiences with Bob. He spent three full days with me in his library helping me in connection with my research for the first edition of Historians’ Guide t Conjuring. Something he didn’t have to do but I think he sensed that my interest was sincere and he wanted to do all he could to help a teenager with his work.

As a collector, I’ve never taken offense at what Bob said. I’ve always viewed it as Bob taking dramatic license in the hopes that he would get through to some of the thick heads and egos in collecting. That’s my view at least. But he said what he said. When I saw him at David Copperfield’s warehouse in 1993, we talked somewhat about his speech and I voiced my opinions to him and told him that someday I might write a rebuttal to his arguments and positions. He said he would welcome that. I’m only sorry that he’s gone now and won’t be able to read my rebuttal. But nothing I’ll say in my rebuttal wasn’t said to Bob when I last saw him.

I think Bob’s views on this subject, taken literally, are problematic, over-simplified, and incorrect. As some of you have suggested, I feel that performers need non-performers in order for magic to progress and stay healthy. Each group needs the other. Little, if anything, in magic today is truly revolutionary – it is evolutionary. If that’s correct, then it’s correct to say that today’s performers rely on magic’s past for their inspiration. And if that’s correct to say, then collectors, historians, biographers, etc., play an indispensable role in keeping magic’s past alive, and without collectors, historians, biographers, etc., to provide these peeps into the past, magic would stagnate. Thus, these groups are every bit as important as the performer for the health of magic. So goes my argument in a nutshell.

Many of the milestones of magic – the watershed events – have nothing to do with the ACT of performing magic. Take the publication of Modern Magic for example. Some say that the publication of Modern Magic marked the dawn of magic’s “golden age” and was the cause of the increased creativity amongst magicians. If that’s true, then it was the act of writing – not performing – that spurred magic on to greater heights. But do we relegate Hoffmann to second class citizen status? No. He’s in magic’s pantheon. And he was put there by the performers, not by the collectors.

Would Houdini exist had he not been inspired by Robert-Houdin’s autobiography? We’ll never know. But we do know that it was a book that inspired Houdini, perhaps more than any performance he saw. Bob argued in his speech that things like books, posters, props, etc., were mere shadows of real life. But if that’s the case, then the “shadow” cast by Robert-Houdin’s was long and explosive, as it arguably helped create the most famous magician in the world. So in his capacity as an author, do we call Robert-Houdin a second class citizen? No.

These are just some fragmented thoughts. They are better developed in my rebuttal.

Thanks again for the thoughtful responses.

Clay

One of the larger issues at this time in conjuring can be phrases as a question: How do we learn from the past if it quickly becomes a few lines in a book and some gossip about artifacts?

A less kindly phrasing might be: How do we honor our past if we insist on not learning from it?

More basely: How can we advance our art if every generation needs to reinvent the wheel?

One of the things collectors do is verify the existence of certain items. A good example is this. In one of the many books about Houdini, there is a photo of a card star that used jumbo cards. After years of researching this, one of the top collectors of Houdini material has come to the conclusion that the prop never existed. To get the cards to do what the people who described it said it did would have required an ability to actually overcome the laws of physics. The conclusion was that Houdini had been photographed with a regular card star that had jumbo cards stuck to the points.

Why? Well, he was Houdini?

Collectors have also verified the various places these great artist actually performed. In the early 20th century, there were very few highways. The automobile was in its infancy. People moved by horse-drawn wagons and carriages. It was not uncommon when travelling in places not served by rail for magicians who worked on the road to camp in open fields, in tents.

There are letters from the Kellar show that back this up. All of these have been rediscovered and saved by collectors.

So certainly if the magicians had not existed, the value of these artifacts would be nil. But they did, and we collect them.

Now I'll say this. Most of the items in my collection are things that I know how to perform with. And I'm not afraid of using a prop if it is in good working order. It's some of the ones that need hospice care that I must be careful with.

As to the value of collectors: as collectors verify the historical accuracy of the objects and the owners of said objects, they are also verifying history. Therefore, the question devolves to the more concise: "Is history important?" And, if one wants to be more broad in their painting of the question "Are museums important?"

The answer to both questions is pretty obvious to me, at least.

And while private collections have always existed, without private collections, the great museums of the world would not have come into being. Even the Art Institute of Chicago (which got a LOT of stuff from the Harding Collection and the Field Collection), the Smithsonian Institute (which started as several independent, private collections, if memory serves) and the Louvre, all started from donations and purchases from private collections.

Collectors are the front rank of the preservationsist of history itself. And one who does not know his or her history, is doomed to re-invent the wheel, over and over again.

Respectfully,

Lee Darrow, C.H.

Sometimes it takes a while for me to come up with an appropriate analogy. But I think I have now. Lee's post pointed me in the right direction.

When I am in Europe, I visit museums in almost every city I have been in. Vienna has some of the best. In one of these museums, there is a huge collection of musical instruments that is rivalled possibly only by the Musikinstrument Museum in Berlin. In many cases, the instruments in these museums are the only evidence we have of the existence of certain kinds of music. While we know what the music of various historical times probably sounded like, (I'm using the term "we" to mean people who have read intensively on the subject and studied it carefully.) the public, and many musicians, themselves, have rather distorted views of this based on things they have heard in the movies, etc.

For example, the music you heard in Cleopatra was, to a great degree, impossible to play on the instruments of the time. We have no historical record of any of the musicans of the time, nor do we have any historical record of any of the composers of the time. All we have are descriptions by various theorists (Pythagoras, et. al.) of the kinds of instruments they had and the emotional content of the music.

Some of this comes into sharp focus when visiting these museums. You can see full sets of heraldic trumpets. But can you name anyone who actually played them? All I can do is name a couple of composers who wrote for them -- Clarke and Purcell.

Occasionally, there is a crossover between composer and performer. J.S. Bach was a composer/conductor/performer. Beethoven was a composer/conductor/performer. Mozart was a composer/conductor/performer. But there were hundreds of musicians that were simply "music machines."

These museums have done us a favor by preserving their instruments. And the Musikinstrument Museum in Berlin is a perfect example of the value of the private collector. It houses the collection of the late Herr Doktor Professor Kurt Sachs, author of the definitive volume on the history of musical instruments.

Museums such as these made it much easier for people like Arnold and Carl Dolmetsch to reproduce the early instruments for which they later became famous.

In my view point there are two kinds of collectors in magic.

First is the collector of props and this person wants to be known as a magician and viewed by the world that he is a magician through ownership of the props. Not performing skills - I own magic props - therefore I am a magician.

The other is the kind of magician that Bob Lund is who is after the history, the inventor, how it was used, and preserving it so that magic can grow and benefit from our past. As Lee Darrow points out in his great post.

To me collecting the history of magic as well as the props is the best of both worlds in collecting.

There is a third kind. That is the person who buys everything he can get his hands on, opens it, tries it once, and puts it into a closet. Or he throws it away. Or he let's his kid have it.

Collectors preserve the History of our art.

I met a guy who collects but he is not a magician, he is more like a scientist. He is very knowledgeable about the things he collects, in the sense that he has a great understanding of the science and physiology of the principles that make them work. He is a nice fella he doesn’t think his collection makes him important but his collection is important to him. I guess he likes collecting the ideas and the items are sort of things to study the ideas behind them.

The collectors are important to our artform. We all stand on the shoulders of giants. Furthermore, these "artifacts" add esteem and depth to what we do. Non-magicians are (in my experience) facinated with magic lore- Houdini, Chung Ling Soo, The Davenport brothers etc.- If you can say a bit about these guys in the throse of your routines or exhibitions, you will enchant you audience and inspire in them a reverence for the artifice of magic. The golden age of magic is a romantic mysterious era to just about everyone.

Tell em the truth-

Cinemagician