In this post I begin to look into some of the research and theories about who S. W. Erdnase was and it involves names of other magicians that you may not be familiar with. I have begun a ‘People’ page which can be found above that will give some brief biographical info on names as they come up. Like everything else here it is very much a work in progress and I will try to expand on it as I go. The page contains a link to a wonderful documentary on Dai Vernon. I highly recommend you make a coffee/tea/scotch and take 45 minutes to watch it.

I have fallen deep down the rabbit hole of Erdnase. It is agreed upon that S. W. Erdnase is a pseudonym but even now, more than a hundred years later, it is not agreed upon who that pseudonym belonged to. I had never really understood the appeal people found in conspiracy theories, I’ve been a bookseller for more years of my life than not and have sold countless books about who shot JFK or which aliens built the pyramids and never understood why it would matter to people but I am starting to be able to relate at least a little. We shall see if that is a good thing or not.

In trying to decide where to start digging into the mystery of Erdnase I took the obvious route today and punched some keywords into google. One of the the links turned up a simple list of references in books and magazines. Part way down the list was Linking Ring May 1989. If you are not familiar with the Linking Ring it is a monthly magazine that is sent to every member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. As it happens I have boxes of them in the basement, including the May 1989 issue.

For more than 400 issues John Booth wrote a column titled Memoirs Of A Magician’s Ghost, a history column, and in May ’89 it was sub-titled Hunting For Erdnase In Copyright Records.

Booth credits Dai Vernon with keeping EATCT from slipping into obscurity, when the greatest close-up magician ever treats a book like a bible others are bound to be interested. Booth goes on to say that he is not going to repeat details from his recently published book Dramatic Magic that reveals the actual identity of Erdnase. I was momentarily disappointed, you can find a lot of things in my basement but a copy of Dramatic Magic was not going to be one of them. However the rest of the column deals with ‘the tortuous and meticulous research’ done to prove that one Milton Franklin Andrews was Erdnase.

Booth then mentions the horror story that unfolded on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner in 1905 dealing with the murder-suicide of M. F. Andrews and his young lover. Now in a perfect world I would move on from the Linking Ring article to reading Booth’s book and then The Man Who Was Erdnase by Barton Whaley, who also points the finger towards M. F. Andrews and then move on to the newspaper stories about the violent end to his life. It is not a perfect world and well I am trying to do as much of my Erdnase journey with physical books curiosity got the best of me and I started tracking down copies of old newspapers online.

Booth mentioned specifically the San Francisco Examiner which unfortunately was not easily accessible but I did manage to find a scan of the The Call which turned out to be my favourite read of the four or five papers I have now seen (a text chat with a librarian was all it took to have scan from the micro-fiche emailed to me). Until a couple of books work their way through various postal systems I can’t tell you why Booth, Gardner, and Whaley were convinced the Erdnase was M. F. Andrews but like they sometimes do in the movies we can start at the end with the Police at the door, his French-Canadian lover turning them away and Andrews hiding in the closet. You know this isn’t going to end well.