Introduction
He took an early morning flight from Washington, D.C. to Columbus, then drove an hour out to the small town of Newark, Ohio, on the strength of a single online listing he could barely make sense of. Somewhere in that building, in a room full of coins, rings, watches, jewelry, and documents recovered from abandoned safe deposit boxes, were two lots described only as photographs that had pictures of Houdini. A clerk brought the first cardboard tray to his table. Charles Greene III set the lid aside, lifted a glass plate by its edge, and held it up to the light.
What he saw, and kept seeing as he worked his way through the boxes, would become "Exposing Houdini: 52 Lost Glass Plate Images," a previously unknown cache of glass plate negatives of Harry Houdini spanning 1903 to 1911, published in the centennial year of Houdini's death. The astonishment compounded plate by plate. These were images Charles recognized in form but had never actually seen: Houdini in the Milk Can, a position in the Water Torture Cell that had never surfaced, plus Houdini and Bess aboard the Malwa on the long voyage toward Australia. By the time he had worked through both lots, the scale of it had settled in.
"I realized that no one has seen the majority of these images, ever."
Charles Greene III is making a return visit to The Magic Book Podcast. He is a corporate magician, magic historian, collector, and author whose previous books include the biography "Ionia: Magician Princess Secrets Unlocked" and "A Complete History of Friedländer Lithography." He is the founder of MagicPosterGallery.com, a member of the Society of American Magicians, a Gold Star member of the Magic Circle, and the only American member of the Paris-based Magic History and Collections Association. "Exposing Houdini" carries a foreword by the Houdini historian John Cox, alongside newspaper accounts of the day and dozens of images that had never before appeared in print. The book launched first in Paris, and then at Bill Smith's Magic Collector Expo.
When Charles last sat down with the podcast for Episode 11, Houdini was not even on his agenda. He had published the Ionia biography and the Friedländer book and was deep into research on Charles De Vere and Frank Godsol. This conversation is the story of how a week-long sale of forgotten safe deposit contents pulled him onto a plane, how he documented a fragile set of negatives before they could vanish again, and what a hundred-year-old box of glass can still teach us about the most photographed magician who ever lived.
A Listing, a Plane, and a Hunch
In early September of 2024, Charles knew only that an auction house in Ohio was running a week-long sale of items abandoned in bank safe deposit boxes, and that two of the lots were Houdini related, listed simply as photographs. The listing image showed someone holding up glass plate negatives, one per lot, with a few boxes stacked on a cardboard tray. Because it was a negative, he was looking at the world reversed, black for white and white for black. He could not tell what was really there. He could only tell that he would never know unless he went.
"Because I've learned that if you want to find out, you have to go, you have to see it, you have to touch it, you have to smell it, you have to be in the room."
So he asked his wife about flying to Ohio to look at a few things for an hour, knowing it might come to nothing, and she said yes.
One Tray at a Time
The auction house turned out to be a combination of several buildings, with sales running in different rooms and people collecting their winnings from each. Charles requested the two lots and they were brought to him one at a time. The first box held glass plate negative boxes with labels on top, some handwritten, some not, all clearly old. He opened the first, picked up a slide by its edge, and was amazed. Then a second. Then a third, by which point he was gobsmacked. He was familiar with the form of these images, but he was certain that the majority of them had never been seen, and that he was the first person in a very long time to be looking.
He describes much of the haul the way a film editor would. Alongside the iconic, recognizable shots were what he calls the B roll, the alternate exposures a photographer would make before deciding which frame to keep. In the days of glass plate negatives there was no contact sheet, so a photographer simply shot multiple plates and chose later. The first Milk Can session in Atlantic City survives as exactly that kind of sequence: Houdini fully dressed in a bathing costume on a carpet, the carpet pulled away, Houdini to the left of the can, to the right, behind it, poking out of it, and finally the famous frame everyone knows.
Recording What Was There
Before he flew, Charles made two phone calls to the auction house and asked two questions: could he see the items, and could he photograph them while he was there. Both answers were affirmative. He then called friends at the Library of Congress, in the Print and Publication and Poster divisions, and told them plainly that he had no idea what he was doing but needed to be ready to shoot photographs of glass negatives wherever and however he found them, since he could not remove them from the property. They gave him what he calls essential information, and that is how he captured the collection.
"And my intention really was not to own them or to get them, but to record what was there in that room."
He worried that images abandoned for so long, if not documented now, could be lost again for another generation, slipping into some private collection the way the Ark disappears into the warehouse at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, present somewhere but unknowable. "I need to see these, I need to document these, I need to share these with the magic community," he says. And to be clear about what he walked away with: "No, I only have the image, I have the images. No one knows who bought all the images of the negatives and where they have wound up."
Detective Work and the "B-Roll"
The research began once the images were safe. Charles is careful to say, "I am not a Houdini expert," and so he went straight to the people who are, contacting John Cox immediately and treating the work as a collaboration. He leaned on the Potter and Potter catalogs, which he likens to a Smithsonian for magic, with their pictures, notes, and acknowledgments offering a wealth of researchable detail, including a 2018 lot of seven glass negatives obtained directly from Houdini. He cross-referenced library archives and private collections, matching alternate exposures against the iconic images already known from books in his own library and others.
A Murky Chain of Custody
One thing remains unknown: whose safe deposit box these plates came from. What can be traced is the line back from there. The plates belonged to Houdini, who gave them to the mentalist Joseph Dunninger. After Dunninger's death they passed to his wife, Billie, and from there the trail gets mysterious. A man from Canada, whom Charles refers to only as Richard, learned of the Dunninger collection and was invited to stay at the house in Cliffside Park, New Jersey, over the course of two or three years, sometimes for a month at a stretch, traveling back and forth and, according to friends who knew him, bringing gifts back to Canada that he said came from Mrs. Dunninger. When Dunninger's daughter and her husband returned to the house and noticed items missing, they forced Richard out. Richard was also connected to a man named Joe Tanner, who published a catalog featuring some of these very images. There is no smoking gun, but Richard died of a sudden heart attack in Canada, and it would make sense that a man of that age and era who passed quickly might have left exactly this kind of cache to be abandoned and forgotten.
Why Dates and Locations Matter
The earliest plates come from a 1903 studio session in Holland, the famous loincloth photographs that had been misdated to 1899 in print for decades. Charles takes correction seriously, partly because he is so aware of how much easier his task is than it was for the historians who came before him, people like Milbourne Christopher, Eddie Dawes, Charles and Regina Reynolds, and Walter B. Gibson, who had to travel to the book and read every page, or go to the newspaper and turn every issue. "I think all correction matters," he says, and even with everything available to him today, some placements drove him to frustration before the answers came.
"You need to be as correct as you possibly can be with dates and locations, because they matter."
The loincloth images also open a window onto how Houdini managed his transatlantic image. In Europe, where the strongman Eugen Sandow had largely normalized the near nude athletic male body, the pictures read differently than they would in an America shaped by the Comstock Act and the respectability of the vaudeville circuit. "It was shocking to see a man's bare chest," Charles notes, and the cover images of the book actually show Houdini's navel, a detail that was cropped out when the photographs were printed at the time. "A belly button was just too far," he says. Some of the more heavily shackled, barely clothed images remain striking even now. "I could not give this book to a child," he admits.
The First Milk Can, and a Meeting on the Boardwalk
Atlantic City in the summer of 1908 gives us the first photographs ever taken of the Milk Can Escape, the moment a signature illusion entered the world. For Charles, holding the plate is its own astonishment, because the very sheet of glass that sat between Houdini and the photographer still exists and is now in his hands. "These are glass items. They're terribly fragile. In a heartbeat they could break and be lost forever," he says, which is what makes their survival so improbable: "the fact that they have existed for more than 100 years as a complete set is astounding."
Just before the Milk Can sequence is an image of Houdini with Harry Kellar on the same boardwalk in June of 1908, only weeks after Kellar's farewell performance. Charles reads it as a generational handoff, one statesman of the art visiting a younger one. "It really is a transition of ages," he says, a meeting that began a friendship lasting until Kellar's death.
Suffragettes, a Wet Sheet, and Two Recipes
November of 1908 takes the story to London and the Suffragette Challenge, where, by Charles's account, six women tied Houdini in a wet sheet at the Oxford Theatre, and, of course, he escaped. The UK movement was the more militant of the two, willing to use direct action to be noticed, and Houdini seems to have recognized the publicity value of aligning himself with the cause. The book also reproduces two recipes from a Suffragette cookbook, and here Charles offers a small correction he caught only after publication: "those two recipes are Houdini's recipes," for deviled eggs and scalloped potatoes. "I've not made them yet, but I will make them, I promise you, because I love to cook."
The Tugboat That Moved a Continent
One image carries Charles's favorite detective story. Convinced it showed a crowd watching one of the Australian bridge jumps near the Yarra River, he posted it to several Facebook groups in Australia asking for help identifying a building in the background. Hundreds of replies came in, many of them insisting it was not Melbourne, perhaps not even Australia. The writing in the image was in English and gave him nothing. Then he noticed a single tugboat in the water and read its name.
"The name of the tugboat was the clue that I needed."
Searching newspaper archives for that name, he discovered the boat was licensed and used around Philadelphia. "So then I realized I'm on the wrong continent. I am so far off," he says. The photograph was not Australia at all but a jump from the Market Street Bridge, with spectators in canoes and the tugboat that pulled Houdini from the water, a scene Charles was able to confirm through a contemporaneous newspaper account of the event.
Australia, and a Question of Where
Charles follows Houdini on the long sea voyage by way of Port Said and Ceylon, then through the 1910 Yarra River jump, the homage to William Davenport at Rookwood Cemetery, the Domain Baths dive, and the flights that made Houdini the first man to fly the Australian continent. The location nuance matters here too. The flights that earned that distinction, three of them, took place at Diggers Rest just outside Melbourne, where the monument stands. Later, in Sydney, flights at Rose Hill were advertised, but those came after the record had been set. After Rose Hill, Houdini never flew again.
The Upside Down
The final chronological chapter is the 1911 Water Torture Cell, which Houdini called "The Upside Down" and described as the climax of all his studies and labors. The newly discovered plate only makes sense alongside the images already known. Picture three frames: image A, Houdini being lowered in; image C, the familiar shot of him hanging inverted with arms crossed; and now image B, recovered in this collection, falling right between them. In image B the cell holds no water, because the session would run long, and Houdini's arms are braced against the bottom of the cell, pushing his body upward so his ankles sit higher than in the hanging frame. He is taking his full weight off his ankles and onto his arms, resting between shots.
"That's a lot of strength to push yourself up, to be confined like that, water or no water, that's quite the human task."
Houdini Behind the Camera, and the Man He Edited Out
The appendix carries two of the book's most revealing pieces. The first is Houdini's April 1909 visit to Charles De Vere's country house in France, which feeds directly into the De Vere biography Charles is preparing. It also reframes Houdini himself, who appears in one photograph holding a camera. Another Facebook inquiry, this time to photography groups, identified it as a Kodak Hawkeye No. 4, and suddenly Houdini becomes the photographer as well as the subject. At De Vere's home, the same camera most likely passed between hands, with Houdini photographing De Vere, then Okita, then Okita photographing them both. Charles finds something poignant in how deliberate that era of image making was. "Today we walk around with our iPhones and we shoot thousands of photographs, and they don't have the same speciality, the same spark, the same uniqueness as in the past."
The second appendix piece is a 1914 photograph taken aboard the S.S. Imperator with Theodore Roosevelt. The original shows seven people; Houdini had it altered to remove five, leaving only himself and the former President. Long before Photoshop, this took real effort, an expert manipulating the glass negative and producing a new image to print. "He was always at the center of every photograph," Charles says, and the motive is one we would recognize instantly today. "Nothing said more that 'I am important' than to be photographed next to a former President of the United States."
A Challenge No One Has Solved
John Cox wrote the foreword and helped identify many of the photographs, and Charles is unreserved about the debt. "John Cox is a wonder," he says, and "this book would be less than if John Cox had not been involved." That spirit of openness runs through the whole project. When John asked whether he could use some of the images for his own future work, Charles said yes without hesitation, because his goal is to push the material outward: "I hope that these images will remain in the public domain for another hundred years, long after we are gone."
That generosity takes its sharpest form at the back of the book, in what Charles calls the Houdini Photo Challenge. One image, of Houdini on what looks like a diving board at an outdoor pool, has defeated everyone who has examined it. Jessica Jane, who owns the original negative, has not placed it. John Cox has not placed it. No one has. "It's the greatest Houdini Photo Challenge," Charles says, and the first person to solve it will get a prize: "you'll get something that is unique, I promise you."
A related Provenance and Questions section invites readers to help resolve lingering puzzles, such as a box labeled "Houdini in can, first photo" and dated 1906, three years before Houdini actually appeared in Atlantic City. John Cox reassured him that Houdini was famously careless about dating his own material, so the discrepancy sits comfortably within the realm of the ordinary. All of this points back to the single fact Charles finds most astonishing of all.
"It is stunning that we know so much about Houdini. There are stacks and stacks of books about Houdini, yet 100 years after he died, a cache of unknown images would just appear … Which makes me wonder, of course, are there more?"
It is the same instinct that has served him with rare posters. "The best way to find out if a poster is really one of a kind is to put it on the Internet and say, 'This is the only one in the world,'" he laughs, because someone always turns out to have one in a closet.
A Six-Week Sprint
The European launch was in Paris in April, and the American launch came at Bill Smith's Magic Collector Expo in Newark, fitting given that New Jersey is where Charles fell in love with magic. He was born and raised in Hackensack, found his first magic books at the Johnson Public Library, met John Henderson and the Zarrows through magic, saw Dai Vernon on his last lecture tour, and made regular Saturday trips into Tannen's in New York. "New Jersey is just magic home," he says. "It's home. I love it."
The book itself came together in a remarkably tight window. A casual December call to the printer Friesens, who had produced the Ionia book, turned into a timeline: six weeks to print, files due at the start of that window, which left Charles the month of February to get a book designed, created, and finished. Working solo, with no team and no formal budget, he set a hard deadline of February 28 and told his designers that anything later would be a failure. The one designer who took it on, Jessica Rosenkranz, delivered, even with a March 1 flight to New Zealand waiting on the other side.
What Comes Next
“Exposing Houdini” pushed two other projects aside, and Charles is eager to return to them. One is a biography of Frank Joseph Godsol, the brother-in-law of Ionia, who became a multimillionaire during the First World War, was persecuted and imprisoned, then invested in Goldwyn Pictures, rose to its presidency, and in 1924 negotiated and signed the merger papers that formed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. "There's no magic involved," Charles concedes, but as a piece of American, European, and Jewish history, "it's a critical book that's never been written." The other is an illustrated history of Charles De Vere, a companion to the Ionia book, built from a wealth of visuals and from his ongoing friendship with De Vere's granddaughter in Paris, for whom he hopes to write the family history she never knew.
A hundred years after Houdini's death, with the shelves already groaning under books about him, Charles Greene III is a reminder that the record is never quite closed. The rarest images can still be sitting in a box in a small town in Ohio, waiting in the dark for someone curious enough to get on a plane and look.
Books and Publications Mentioned
Works by Charles Greene III:
"Exposing Houdini: 52 Lost Glass Plate Images," with a foreword by John Cox (2026)
"Ionia: Magician Princess Secrets Unlocked," by Charles Greene III (2022)
"A Complete History of Friedländer Lithography," by Charles Greene III (2023)
Projects in the Pipeline:
A biography of Frank Joseph Godsol, the financier behind the formation of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
An illustrated history of Charles De Vere, a companion volume to the Ionia book
Also Referenced:
The writings of Walter B. Gibson
Potter and Potter auction catalogs, cited as a research resource for magic history
Resources
To purchase "Exposing Houdini" and Charles Greene III's other titles, visit: ExposingHoudini.com
To explore Charles's poster gallery: MagicPosterGallery.com
Timestamps
00:00 Introduction to The Magic Book Podcast
02:06 Guest introduction: Charles Greene III and "Exposing Houdini"
02:14 First awareness of the collection: the Ohio auction
03:14 The decision to fly to Ohio on a single listing
04:38 Lifting the first glass plate: what the images revealed
07:49 Capturing the images during the preview window
10:08 Clarifying that the plates themselves were not acquired
10:25 Detective work, Potter and Potter, and the "B roll"
14:00 The chain of custody from Houdini to Dunninger to Ohio
17:58 The 1903 Holland loincloth photographs and getting dates right
19:36 Transatlantic image management, Sandow, and the Comstock Act
21:32 Atlantic City 1908: the first Milk Can Escape photographs
22:41 Houdini and Harry Kellar on the boardwalk, June 1908
24:32 London and the November 1908 Suffragette Challenge
26:18 The tugboat clue and a continent-sized correction
30:00 The voyage to Australia and the first flights
31:22 The 1911 Water Torture Cell: "The Upside Down"
33:30 Houdini behind the camera and the De Vere appendix
35:54 The altered Roosevelt photograph aboard the S.S. Imperator
38:16 Collaborating with John Cox
39:20 The Houdini Photo Challenge
41:01 Provenance, dating, and open questions
42:29 The most surprising aspect: are there more?
43:34 Launches in Paris and Newark, and New Jersey roots
44:49 A six-week sprint to a finished book
47:45 Projects in the pipeline: Godsol and De Vere
49:56 Where to find "Exposing Houdini" and other titles
50:25 Closing