Houdini...the corkscrew

Check out the TV commercial for the amazing Houdini Corkscrew by Metrokane. The company has launched entire line of "Houdini" food and wine products.

And just in case you don’t approve of Houdini’s good name being used for such crass commercialism, gaze below at this newspaper ad for a food market in 1899. Houdini was a pioneer of tie-in marketing, and I expect he would be thrilled that his name still "sells" in 2008.

Houdini A Pictorial Life

The Houdini Code

The Houdini Code is a Canadian documentary produced in 2007 that focus exclusively on Houdini’s relationship to spiritualism and the controversy surrounding the coded message delivered to Bess by the Rev. Arthur Ford after Houdini’s death.

Don’t let the DVD cover art fool you, this is a very well-done professional documentary with quality interviews and some nice rare photos, particularly of Bessie.

One thing that’s interesting is the documentary states without qualification that Ed Saint was Bessie’s "new husband."

Leading Houdini collector Arthur Moses has acquired DVD copies The Houdini Code for sale in the U.S. To purchase, contact Arthur via email.

UPDATE: The Houdini Code is now available to stream on Amazon Video.

Houdini Laid Bare on Amazon

The beautiful special two-volume edition of The Secret Life of Houdini by William Kalush and Larry Sloman is now available on Amazon.com.

Packaged in a slipcase, the two-set collection contains a first edition of The Secret Life of Houdini with a new colored frontispiece signed by both authors, and The Secret Life of Houdini Laid Bare, a companion volume that compiles all the authors unpublished notes, material that was edited out of the biography, and more than seventy rare photographs.

Each book is numbered and only 1,000 sets have been produced.

The two-volume set was previously only available from specialty magic publisher Mike Caveney.