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David Copperfield is sharing “The History of Magic” with the world.
Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2021 | 2 a.m.
Only a small group of privileged Las Vegans know about the International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts, an off-Strip warehouse building disguised as an apparel storehouse. It’s actually the private magic museum curated and operated by David Copperfield and the team behind his long-running and popular production show at MGM Grand, and only a select group of VIPs have been invited for tours.
But now many more people around the world will learn about the museum. Copperfield and collaborators Richard Wiseman, David Britland and Homer Liwag have compiled and released “David Copperfield’s History of Magic,” an epic volume showcasing the most influential and groundbreaking magicians throughout time.
“This museum has been almost 30 years of my life,” Copperfield says on the latest Sun on the Strip podcast. “It’s a secret museum, because of all the secrets involved, and people get to tour it by invitation only. So the book is a way of allowing other people to see this amazing place and some of the highlights. But the book itself is only two or three years in the making because I was searching for another way to share this place. It’s a very rich history and I’m really proud of it.”
Copperfield says his career in entertainment has always been about moving magic forward, so it was only in the last couple of decades that he began to embrace a different role as a bit of a historian and a steward for his art form of choice.
“I acquired a collection of things just to kind of rescue it and keep it together, and I started learning about the stories of these magicians, and suddenly it was vibrant,” he says. “Stories are very important to me. We learn from stories. We learn from our past. So in the last 20 years I’ve been looking back as well as looking forward and … through the book I found out some incredible things I didn’t know.”
When his show was shut down last year during the pandemic, Copperfield kept his entire crew employed and the team focused its energy on expanding the museum. They discovered exactly how much material was being stored, including thousands of duplicate books on magic.
“We had the whole team working 24/7 creating this library and research center,” he says. “For better or for worse, we learned so much during COVID. Humanity does rise above all the challenges we have, and that’s part of magical thinking, that we are challenged that we can’t do this or that, that this is impossible. Magicians have to think in a different way to work around lots of issues and overcome those things to make the impossible look possible, and in many cases make them possible.”
Copperfield continues to be one of the most prolific entertainers headlining on the Las Vegas Strip these days, hitting the stage in his customized theater for 15 shows a week. After so much time away from live performances, he says he’s learned to appreciate different parts of the production in new ways.
“I do three shows Saturdays and two shows every other day. But the audience is the reason I’m there,” he says. “I enjoy them, I enjoy the experience, and if I wasn’t having a good time I wouldn’t do it. It’s very rewarding. I’ve been doing meet-and-greets in a different way now where I’m doing a little command performance backstage, and I look forward to it. I get to do a piece of new material to test for that group backstage and it’s really fun, and they’re happy about it, too.”
