Magician of the Week #48: Rabbits!

This week’s featured magician isn’t technically a magician, but rather a magician’s most classic, well-loved, time-honored sidekick: the rabbit.

There’s a bit of debate about the first magician to pull a rabbit from a hat–some say it was Louis Comte, in 1814, while others claim it was John Henry Anderson, “The Great Wizard of the North”. Either way, rabbits in hats have become synonymous with stage magic, as evidenced by the expressively-eyebrowed fellow above.

Today’s featured rabbits span decades, but all are taken from various covers of Ireland’s Magic Company Yearbook. We made a rabbit-y collage to showcase some of these soft sidekicks!

You can find issues of Ireland’s Magic Company Yearbook, along with innumerable other rabbit illustrations, in our John H. Percival Collection on Magic.

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Magician of the Week #1

Today we offer the first entry of a regular weekly feature: The Magician of the Week. Magicians tend to be excellent (and often quite dapper) self-promoters, so this is a way to offer a weekly image with a dose of style and flair. We start with a classic scenario, the rabbit in the hat.

John Booth with Rabbit

Image taken from a copy of Booth’s Forging Ahead in Magic (Philadelphia: Kanter’s Magic Chop, 1939 — Percival #110) inscribed to John Percival:

More about John Booth.