George the Supreme Master of Magic: The Posters for a Tour That Never Happened

A young man's face fills most of the sheet, lit from the left against a full moon, blue-black night behind him. An owl perches on his shoulder, close enough to his ear to whisper. Bats cross the moon. On the branch above, a small red devil sits watching. Below, in yellow letters built to be read from the far side of a street: GEORGE, THE SUPREME MASTER OF MAGIC. Above that, smaller, the claim the whole sheet is built around.

The tour never really happened. It was printed for a comeback that collapsed, so most of the run was never pasted to a wall at all. Which makes these strange objects among antique magic posters. Most surviving sheets from the golden age of stage magic survive despite being used. These survive because they were not.

A magician from Zanesville

Grover George was born in Zanesville, Ohio. On the year, the record splits. The Huntington Library, Poster Auctions International and Bonhams give 18 August 1887. Two magic historians working independently give 1877. No birth record settles it. He died in São Paulo on 14 September 1958, and that much is agreed.

He began as thousands of provincial magicians began, with a school hall and a decade of small Midwestern theatres behind it. What separated him was a single transaction.

In 1922 he bought the equipment and performing rights to an illusion act called the Hong Kong Mysteries from William "Doc" Nixon, who had himself acquired it in 1909 by trading his Brooklyn house to Theodore Bamberg, the magician who worked as Okito. Nixon then left magic for radio, and reappeared with a version of the same material in 1927, five years after selling the rights to it, which tells you most of what you need to know about Doc Nixon.

What the act did on stage is not recorded. No programme survives listing the effects. We have the genre, an oriental illusion show of cabinets, productions and vanishes in the tradition Chung Ling Soo had made commercially safe, and we have the posters. The posters are about how it was sold, not what it was.

Four designs, one job in Cleveland

At some point in the 1920s George took his poster commission to the Otis Lithograph Company of Cleveland, Ohio, one of the few American houses that mattered for this work.

When, exactly, is a muddle. Bonhams catalogues its sheet as around 1920. Potter & Potter put two of the designs at around 1926 and 1928. The Huntington Library, cataloguing its own copy, declined to go closer than somewhere in 1920 to 1929. Poster Auctions International and Heritage both say around 1929, and they are the only two that explain themselves: both tie the campaign directly to George's return from South America, PAI writing that the sheet is one of the designs created for that triumphant American tour.

They cannot all be right, and the sheets themselves say why.

Every Otis poster carries a printer's line tucked into a dark corner of the illustration: THE OTIS LITHOGRAPH CO., CLEVELAND O., MADE IN U.S.A., and beneath it a plate number. On three of these four designs the number can be read. The Triumphant American Tour composite is 41640. The cards and cauldron sheet is 41641. The Hong Kong Mysteries is 41642.

They run consecutively, and that is not a coincidence. Otis was a busy shop turning out work for circuses, theatres and touring shows across the country. For three designs belonging to one client to land on three unbroken numbers, whatever it was the shop was counting, those three had to enter the count together.

The fourth sheet, the portrait with the owl and the moon, has never given us a readable number. The imprint there is either absent or too far gone to make out. 41639 would complete the run neatly, and it is the obvious guess. We have not read it, so we do not claim it.

What the numbers cannot do is date the job. No key to the Otis series appears to have been published, and the sequence plainly does not track the calendar in any simple way: an Otis-printed Thurston poster the Library of Congress dates to about 1935 carries the far lower number 2445, which may not even be the same kind of number.

So the run settles one question and not the other. These designs belong to each other, which means a trade that dates one of them to 1920 and another to 1928 is pulling apart a set Otis numbered in a single unbroken sequence. Which year that sequence was cut, the paper does not say.

Read the copy and you can see who the move was aimed at.

18 PEOPLE. CARLOAD OF SCENIC EFFECTS.

Howard Thurston, then the dominant full-evening illusion show in America, moved his company by railway train. George is advertising one railway car. He has borrowed Thurston's grammar wholesale, the language of payroll and freight and scale, at a fraction of Thurston's size, hoping nobody does the arithmetic.

The doors that would not open

When George went to book the good American theatres, he could not get in.

The account magic history hands down is that Thurston kept him out deliberately, telling bookers he would pull his own show from any house that also played George, and, depending on the version, threatening lawsuits over stolen illusions. George's father, a Zanesville attorney, is said to have tried to fight it and failed.

It is a story told entirely by one side. There is no contemporary newspaper account, no court record, and nothing from Thurston, whose own biographical record does not mention George at all. At least three incompatible versions circulate among collectors. The vaudeville historian Trav S.D. adds the sensible objection: most of George's illusions were not unique to either man. Levitations, vanishing cabinets, oriental mystery boxes. These were the common stock of the genre.

The outcome is not in dispute. By about 1924 George had taken the show abroad instead.

Carter the Great is the useful comparison. Shut out of the same bookings, Carter built a career on world tours and a wall of chromolithographs instead. George took that road at a fraction of the scale, and without Carter's eventual homecoming.

Five years south

The Latin American years are the best documented part of his working life and the most successful. Cuba, then Central America, then south through Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires and Montevideo, with accounts of performances deep along the Amazon. One source, uncorroborated anywhere else, has him playing for the Venezuelan president Juan Vicente Gómez and leaving with a bag of bolívars worth a thousand dollars.

The posters mislead on one point. The pagodas, the lanterns, the idol, the Hong Kong in the title: none of it records anywhere George went. It is marketing, not itinerary.

In 1929, after roughly five years away, George came home to try America again. This is the tour the lettering is shouting about, and the two auction houses that commit to a date put the campaign here: the triumphant American tour is the homecoming, sold in advance.

It failed. He played tents rather than theatres, and by the late 1930s had settled in Brazil for good.

What became of him, and of the paper

He did not end poor or forgotten, which is the ending this story usually gets. In Brazil he built a business manufacturing projection machines for cinemas and theatres, and was involved in the early days of Brazilian television.

There is one piece of genuine trade praise on the record. The Linking Ring, April 1939, reviewed by M.S. Mahendra: "Here is one of the best magic acts on the road today." The review notes he was working big magic and illusions with only his wife to assist him. Eighteen people and a carload of scenic effects, down to two. That line does more than any biography.

The posters had a better time of it. The Otis run, according to accounts that circulate through the trade, was never fully paid for and never used. Thousands of sheets went into storage, were bought by a Wisconsin merchant, and sat unexposed until they were rediscovered in the early 1980s in near-mint condition. The story appears in near-identical wording across half a dozen dealers, which usually means one source rather than six, and they cannot agree on the buyer's first name. Treat it as trade history rather than provenance.

What is verifiable is the effect. A substantial body of George material reached the market through the collection of Norm Nielsen, sold at Potter & Potter in 2016, and George sheets have appeared steadily since at Poster Auctions International, Bonhams, Heritage, and in 2021 in Sotheby's sale of the Ricky Jay collection. They survive because the tour failed. Had 1929 gone the other way they would have been pasted to hoardings, rained on and lost, the way almost all successful advertising is lost.

The draughtsman nobody named

Nobody knows who drew these. Every serious cataloguer records the artist as anonymous, because commercial lithography houses did not credit their staff. Some draughtsman on East 30th Street in Cleveland, whose name is gone, was handed a photograph of a magician from Ohio and told to make him look like the most important man in America.

He did it well enough that a century later the face is the only part that survived. Not the act, which nobody wrote down. Not the tour, which collapsed. Not the name, which meant nothing outside the trade within ten years. An uncredited hand in a Cleveland print shop is the reason anyone says the words Grover George at all.

Collecting it today

Original Otis printings surface regularly, which is unusual for a 1920s magic poster and comes straight out of that unused-stock story. The common portrait sheets run from roughly 20 by 26 inches to 27 by 40 inches, with an eight-sheet at 80 by 102 inches above them and the wide multi-panel billboard above that. Smaller formats have changed hands in the low hundreds, premium formats and conditions into four figures.

On copyright, these four sheets are clear in all three markets Vintage Poster Archives sells into, and clear on every date the trade has proposed for them.

In the United States, a work published before 1931 has run its full ninety-five-year term, so a sheet printed anywhere in the 1920s is public domain whether or not the copyright was ever registered or renewed. In the United Kingdom, an artistic work of unknown authorship runs seventy years from the year it was made public, which for these expired by 2000 at the latest. In Canada, an anonymous work runs seventy-five years from publication, expiring here by 2005. The Canadian extension to life plus seventy in December 2022 changed the rule for known authors and revived nothing that had already lapsed.

There is a neat footnote to all this. If somebody identified the draughtsman tomorrow it would change nothing, because in all three countries the anonymous term has to still be running before a named-author term can replace it. These ran out decades ago. The man who drew George is beyond the reach of the law that might have protected him, which is roughly the position he occupied in 1929 as well.

Vintage Poster Archives sells digitally restored reproductions of all four designs, printed locally on 200gsm Enhanced Matte Fine Art paper. Never originals, and never sold as such. The sizes differ by design, because we only offer a size the original sheet can carry at full sharpness:

• Buddha, the cards and cauldron design, up to A0
• Owl and Moon, the close-up portrait, up to A1
• Pyramids, the Triumphant American Tour composite, up to A1
• Hong Kong, the sheet that names the act, up to A3

Explore these designs in the Vintage Magic Posters collection, alongside Houdini, Carter, Kellar and the other masters of theatrical mischief.

Frequently asked questions

How many GEORGE posters are there, and is there a complete set?

Four designs are known: the portrait with the owl and moon, the Triumphant American Tour composite, the cards and cauldron, and the Hong Kong Mysteries. Three of them carry a consecutive run of Otis plate numbers, 41640 to 41642, which is strong evidence they were produced together as a single job. The owls sheet has not given us a readable number. A wide billboard design exists in a separate format. No authoritative census of the full series has been published, and claims of larger sets are worth checking against plate numbers rather than taking on trust.

What are the Otis plate numbers on the GEORGE posters?

41640 on the Triumphant American Tour composite, 41641 on the cards and cauldron, 41642 on the Hong Kong Mysteries, each beneath the imprint reading THE OTIS LITHOGRAPH CO., CLEVELAND O., MADE IN U.S.A. Those three were read directly off the sheets. The portrait with the owl and moon has no imprint we can read, so its number is unknown. 41639 would complete the sequence, but we have not seen it and do not claim it.

When were the GEORGE posters printed?

The trade does not agree. Bonhams catalogues around 1920, Potter & Potter around 1926 and 1928, the Huntington Library somewhere in 1920 to 1929, and Poster Auctions International and Heritage around 1929. The last two are the only ones that give a reason, both tying the campaign to George's return from South America in 1929. Since three of the four designs carry consecutive plate numbers, they were almost certainly produced together, whatever year that was.

Did Howard Thurston really blacklist Grover George?

It is the story magic history tells, but it rests entirely on accounts from George's side. No contemporary newspaper report, court record or Thurston-side account has surfaced, and Thurston's own biographical record does not mention George. What is certain is that George failed to break into the top American theatres and took his show to Latin America instead.

Did George ever perform in Hong Kong?

No evidence suggests he did. The Hong Kong Mysteries was the name of an act he bought in 1922, and the oriental imagery is a genre convention of Western stage magic rather than a record of travel.

Who designed the GEORGE posters?

Nobody knows. Poster Auctions International lists the artist as anonymous and the Huntington Library records no artist at all, only the printer. Otis Lithograph, like every large commercial house of the period, did not credit its designers, letterers and colourists.

Is the Wisconsin barn story about the GEORGE posters true?

It is the accepted trade account rather than documented provenance. The story is that the unused run was bought by a Wisconsin merchant named Heaney and sat in storage until the early 1980s. It appears in near-identical wording across many dealer listings, the sources disagree on his first name, and no estate record has surfaced. The high survival rate of unused George sheets is consistent with it.

Can I buy a GEORGE poster print from Vintage Poster Archives?

Yes, as digitally restored reproductions of all four designs, printed on 200gsm archival paper. Never sold as originals. The largest size offered differs by design, because each is capped at the point where the original sheet stops being sharp: Buddha to A0, Owl and Moon and Pyramids to A1, and Hong Kong to A3.

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