Dear magic company owner,
I’m about to give you the blueprint to a better future of magic—while using its most boring, overlooked, yet most noble pursuit: magic preservation.
In 2023, I wanted to create a video series about one of my heroes, Lubor Fiedler. My plan was for it to culminate eventually into an interactive art exhibit in New York City, where audiences could perform Lubor’s tricks for each other as they understood his life’s story. This would be the ultimate way to honor his gifts to the magic world and create more magicians—like he did when he first escaped Czechoslovakia. You would imagine that getting access to Lubor’s work should be easy, considering the many products that he released over the years, including with Tenyo. But everything was out of stock. What’s worse, the usual sources of preservation materials, including the New York Public Library, had nothing substantial on Lubor. He was part of the small, secretive world of magic. So the most I could find was his video series on YouTube, and a profile in Genii from 2014.
Nevertheless, I persevered. I kept digging. In an old performance of the Gozinta Boxes, I recognized the person introducing Lubor. They turned out to be one of his closest friends. I reached out. They declined to help because I wasn’t monetizing the project. How could I? I’m working with the same lack of funding and time as the preservation organizations I’m writing about.