Hidden treasures and magical secrets in David Copperfield’s clandestine library

Magician David Copperfield swears he has nothing up his sleeves.

It’s all in a secret warehouse on the outskirts of Las Vegas.

Known as the International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts, Copperfield’s archive is crammed with over 100,000 books, costumes, and tricks. And its myriad treasures are documented in “David Copperfield’s History of Magic,” written by Copperfield, Richard Wiseman, and David Britland.

Copperfield’s collection is not open to the general public. Only researchers – and the few lucky fans he invites – even know where it is. And even that is a pretty good ruse. In what looks like a men’s clothing store, guests go into the changing room, pull the necktie hanging on a hook, and open a secret door.

What awaits is a space brimming with rarities the illusionist has spent years – and millions – collecting.

“Magic matters,” Copperfield insists, explaining his obsession. “It transports people into a world in which the impossible appears possible. Precious items appear out of nowhere, objects defy gravity, and people are sawed in half and magically restored. Watching a great magic show opens people’s minds and inspires them to achieve the extraordinary.”

It’s also an incredible amount of fun.

The oldest exhibit in Copperfield’s collection is a book from 1584, attacking the era’s witchhunts and explaining how to reproduce most of the reported magic easily. The most recent items are probably Copperfield’s own, memorabilia from shows that have made him perhaps history’s most successful magician.

You won’t see anything from Copperfield’s contemporaries, including Penn & Teller or Ricky Jay, the late sleight-of-hand artist who was one of Copperfield’s rivals and rival collectors. Relations between the two seem to have been strained (asked once what he thought of David Copperfield, Jay replied, “I prefer ‘Great Expectations.’”)

Almost everyone else is here, though.

Harry Houdini, of course, and Doug Henning share space with forgotten stars like The Great Malini, Chung Ling Soo, and “Alexander: The Man Who Knows.” Here too, captured in gorgeous photographs by Homer Liwag, are the cards and scarves and trick guillotines that made up their acts.

But while Copperfield loves taking out his treasures, like most magicians, he steadfastly refuses to explain them.

It’s one of the codes of a club Copperfield joined early. Born David Seth Kotkin in Metuchen, N.J. in 1956, he was 8 when he walked inside his first magic store and fell in love. By 10, he was performing locally as Davino the Boy Magician. By 22, he had a network special, “The Magic of David Copperfield.”

“I remember my father putting up posters in his store saying, ‘Please watch our son. Make his mom happy,’” Copperfield writes. “Fortunately the show was a hit.”

Since, Copperfield, and his shows, have only grown bigger.

“Over the years, I have appeared to walk through the Great Wall of China, escaped from Alcatraz, caused a jet to vanish, and made the Statue of Liberty disappear,” he writes. “When I see audience members being moved by my magic, I am moved; magic has the power to redirect people away from their worries and concerns and, perhaps most important of all, to inspire and provide hope.”

Hope, perhaps, but sometimes a good scare is what people crave.

Copperfield traces the famous “sawing a woman in half” illusion to magician P.T. Selbit, who first performed it in London in 1921. Soon other conjurers, like Howard Thurston, were copying him. Aldo Richiardi Jr. upped the stakes with a buzz saw and a twist: In his rendition, the trick supposedly didn’t work, and blood spattered the stage.

After the apparently lifeless body was wheeled offstage, the magician quickly assured the horrified audience it was all an illusion. After all, he said with gruesome glee, he couldn’t afford to kill a woman every night.

Other artists were more genteel, affecting top hats and walking sticks – even if the hats held rabbits and the canes sprouted flowers. In the ‘30s, The Great Malini sported a fur coat and performed before European royalty. Name a playing card, and he made it pop out of his mouth; put your hat down, and he picked it up to reveal a block of ice.

Unimpressed by polite sleight-of-hand, Houdini earned his legend by risking everything, including his life, for his act. Specializing in escapes, he went from breaking out of handcuffs to wriggling out of strait-jackets. Houdini hung from skyscrapers and reportedly once even had himself sewn into the stinking carcass of a dead seal.

He emerged victorious, always, until a backstage incident in 1926. Houdini used to challenge fans to punch him in his rock-hard abs, but one day an eager man caught him unprepared and left him with a ruptured appendix. Houdini died on Halloween.

While clever props were a big part of most magicians’ shows, others did without. In 1906, magician Claude Alexander Conlin arrived at a Texas theater before his equipment had. He went on anyway, improvising a mind-reading show. After audiences raved, he donned a turban and became “Alexander: The Man Who Knows.”

How Alexander knew depended on some old-fashioned help (his assistants worked the crowd before the show, eavesdropping on conversations) and new technology (a radio transmitter in his turban allowed them to feed him tips). With his apparent ability to see into people’s hearts, Alexander became one of the country’s wealthiest conjurers.

Sleaziest, too. Like the conman mentalist of “Nightmare Alley,” Alexander soon realized people gullible enough to believe in mindreading were easy marks for anything. He started a mail-order business, selling pamphlets on topics from constipation to copulation. He then turned his deceptive skills to bigamy, blackmail, and bootlegging.

Although the police were regularly on Alexander’s trail, his most useful trick was making bribes suddenly appear and charges just as quickly vanish. He died at 74, retired, rich, happy, and free.

Other magicians had grimmer endings.

Many lived to see their fame fade; some threw it away. Doug Henning, the hippie star of Broadway’s “The Magic Show,” fell under the spell of the Beatles’ former guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, and abandoned show business to devote himself to starting a Transcendental Meditation theme park. It never materialized, and Henning died in 2000 of cancer, forgotten at 52.

Other magicians made more dramatic exits. Turn-of-the-century performer William Robinson put on makeup, glued on a pigtail, and billed himself as Chung Ling Soo, an Eastern mystic impervious to firearms. It worked until, one fateful night, it didn’t. The gun that wasn’t supposed to fire sent a slug into Robinson’s chest. He died the next morning.

Even more gruesome was the final curtain for Kasfikis, one of the first to do the buzz saw illusion. Kasfikis used a real buzz saw – until one day, driving his truck to his next show, he was forced to swerve. The crate with the saw jolted forward and neatly decapitated him. The deadly prop ended up in Richiardi Jr.’s act, where it now only pretended to dismember people.

Bad taste, perhaps, but the magic show must go on. It continues in the work of entertainers like Copperfield, who mastered his first great trick years ago – making a quiet boy from New Jersey disappear and in his place – rose a superstar magician.