Magician and escape artist Harry Houdini was quite the collector, filling warehouses and his Harlem home with books, posters, newspaper clippings, and more. It probably shouldn’t be surprising that Houdini was a bit obsessive, but his collecting was next level. Some of his library was for the craft, and helped him build his act—he collected books on safes and prison architecture, as well as catalogs from lock manufacturers—but he also had an archivist’s eye. Houdini had a particular obsession with documenting and preserving items related to the history of magic, spiritualism, and theater, and by the end of his life had amassed impressive collections that rivaled those at Harvard and the British Museum.

Everywhere Houdini traveled he bought books, he had standing relationships with rare book dealers, and he took out ads in magazines asking for new materials and leads.The fixation was so extreme, according to the introduction to Eric Colleary’s new book Houdini’s Library , that in a moment of frightening…