Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Division
Get tickets here: Memoirs of a Magic Queen: Restoring Adelaide Herrmann’s Lost Legacy Tickets, Monday, October 5 • 6:30 PM – 7:30 PM | Eventbrite
Tickets are priced as a donation pay what you please!
Magician, historian, and author Margaret B. Steele introduces her new book, Queen of Magic: The Wondrous, Unstoppable Adelaide Herrmann.
In her day, Madame Adelaide Herrmann was more famous than her younger colleague, Harry Houdini. For nearly sixty years, Adelaide Herrmann (1853-1932) ruled the global stage. She caught speeding bullets with her bare hands. She soared through the air as a human cannonball. Alongside her husband, Alexander, she executed the most mesmerizing illusions of the Golden Age of Magic. Then tragedy struck. Widowed at forty-three, Adelaide stepped into the magician’s role as the sole headliner. For three thrilling decades, she reigned supreme as vaudeville’s Queen of Magic.
Determined to preserve the Herrmann legacy, Adelaide Herrmann had nearly finished writing a highly anticipated memoir when she died suddenly at age seventy-eight, and her manuscript disappeared. The Queen of Magic remained forgotten for nearly eight decades until her lost memoir finally surfaced in 2010. Its initial publication in 2012 sparked a nascent Adelaide Herrmann revival, inspiring new academic, theatrical, and cinematic works.
Join Margaret B. Steele in commemorating her twenty-five years of Herrmann research and collecting with the release of her newly annotated and expanded edition of Madame Herrmann’s memoir. The new volume features interwoven news and magazine articles, personal letters, interviews, and more than 100 rare images, including photos and posters contributed by the Billy Rose Theatre Division.
The multi-media presentation will include an illustrated talk, magic performances, and a display of rarely seen Herrmann memorabilia, followed by a book signing. Copies of Queen of Magic: The Wondrous, Unstoppable Adelaide Herrmann will be available for purchase at the event.
ENTRY NOTE | Enter via 111 Amsterdam Avenue New York, NY 10023 – Harvey Fierstein Theatre Lab
SEATING POLICY | Programs are free and open to all, but registration is requested. Check-in line forms 45 minutes before the advertised start time. Registered guests are given priority check-in 15 to 30 minutes before start time. Five minutes before the advertised start time, all seats are released, regardless of registration, to our patrons in the stand-by line. If you arrive after the program starts, you will be seated at the discretion of our front-of-house staff.
STANDBY LINE | If registration is sold out or has ended, do not fret! We welcome you to come to the Library regardless of registration status and wait in our standby line, which forms 45 minutes before the advertised start time. Five minutes before the program starts, all remaining seats are released. While this is not guaranteed, we will do our best to get you into any of our programs.
ASSISTIVE LISTENING AND ASL | ASL interpretation and real-time (CART) captioning available upon request. Please submit your request at least two weeks in advance by emailing accessibility@nypl.org.
BRUNO WALTER POLICY | Please note that any unoccupied seat will be released five minutes before the show begins and holding seats for anyone beyond that is prohibited. There is no food or drink allowed inside the venue.
AUDIO/VIDEO RECORDING | Programs may be photographed and recorded by and at the discretion of the Library for the Performing Arts and will post signs indicating as such. If you would prefer your image not be captured, please let us know and we can seat you accordingly. Attending any program indicates your consent to being filmed/photographed and your consent to the use of your recorded image for any and all purposes of the New York Public Library.
PRESS | Please send all press inquiries to Alex Teplitzky at alexteplitzky@nypl.org. Please note that all recording, including professional video recordings, are prohibited without expressed consent from the Library.
