Who is this Mike Rose guy?

Why does this website exist? The short answer is, because I want it to! I’m Mike Rose, and I love learning about the history of magic— the more obscure the better. But that hasn’t always been the case. At the age of eight I received a magic set and that was it; my interests from that point on were all focused on magic. Eventually I became a professional magician. For 20 years my magic career was solely as a performer until an unexpected event occurred. I didn’t stop performing (and still haven’t) but I got blindsided by magic history.

I know the exact incident that got me interested in magic history; the event that pushed me off into the deep end. In my quest to digest everything related to magic, I subscribed to all the magic periodicals. One in particular was called The Lulu Hurst Society. It turned out not to be a magazine really but more of a series of packages— or Encumbrances as the publisher liked to call them. The Lulu Hurst Society was the brainchild of magician, artist, author and all-around interesting guy, Tom Jorgenson. The Lulu Hurst Society was short lived and lasting from 1995 to 2000. It had only a handful of subscribers, and I think it flew under the radar of most magicians. Each Encumbrance was made up of an eclectic assortment of original material by Jorgenson, reprints of old magic ephemera, booklets, contributions from subscribers, etc. At the end of the five year run there had been eight mailings and approximately 85 titled items. Each package really was a joy to open and digest. 

It was in 1998 when a particular item in one of the Encumbrances caught my attention: a reprint of a 1934 booklet titled The Sensational Poison Swallowing Act. It wasn’t so much the title or the booklet’s contents that raised my curiosity (to this day I have no interest in swallowing poison during my show), it was the author’s name, J. Karson. I had heard of Joe Karson who I knew was the inventor of the Zombie. The Zombie was a floating ball trick that most magicians were familiar with and performed at one time or another, including me. I wondered if “J. Karson” was the same man of Zombie fame. The coincidence of there being two magicians named Karson with their first name starting with the letter J seemed a bit unlikely (but then, I am aware of another magician named Mike Rose, so anything is possible). I called Tom and asked him if he knew whether J. Karson was Joe Karson, the inventor of the Zombie. He confessed he wasn’t sure if it was the same man or not. I told him it wasn’t a big deal, that I was merely curious. Then I said those fateful words, “It’s not like I’m going to write a book about him or anything.” One year of research and writing later, I published my first book, Joe Kason - Beyond Zombie. Thanks Tom!

Moving forward over the years I began frequenting magic collectors’ conventions. I met many magic historians and collectors and attended countless magic history lectures, enjoying each and every one. I didn’t have a specific focus to my magic history interest or collecting, I simply wanted to learn as much as I could. That was until 2016. 

In 2016, my friend Mark Walker approached me about working with him on a magic biography. I have known Mark since 2000 when we met at the Magic Collectors’ Association convention held in Baltimore that year. Mark is a respected magic historian and an expert Punch & Judy man. Mark had been working on a book about Baltimore magician and owner of the Yogi Magic Mart, Phil Thomas. In 2016, Mark asked me to come onboard and work on the Phil Thomas book with him. In 2020, during the height of the pandemic, we completed and published Maryland’s Ambassador of Magic: Phil Thomas and the Yogi Magic Mart. Mark was an excellent writing partner, and I had a great time working on that book. As a result of that project, I developed a deep interest in Baltimore magic history. Although Tom Jorgenson ignited my interest in magic history in general, Mark Walker is responsible for sending me down the path to specifically explore the magic history that Baltimore has to offer. 

Today, I can’t get enough of Baltimore’s magical past. Of course, there are classic bits of well-known Baltimore magic history such as the 1908 passing of the mantel of magic from Kellar to Thurston on the stage of Baltimore’s Ford’s Theater (more specifically Ford's Grand Opera House as it was christened upon its opening in 1871). But there is a ton of information to be mined that lies forgotten waiting to be unearthed. The stories that can be discovered are dazzling to the interested researcher. Which, coincidentally, happens to be me. 

It has become my passion to track down magicians from decades past and tell their stories. I intend to rediscover forgotten magic shops and learn about their proprietors. I will delve into obscure magic clubs and organizations that faded away many years before I was born. All of this and more can be accomplished in Baltimore, right in my backyard. I’m not a native of Baltimore or even Maryland, but I have lived here for over two-thirds of my life. I hope you’ll take the journey with me as I dive deep into the conjuring history of my adopted hometown.  

If you have read this far and the writing made sense, you can thank my wife, Gina. All my writing receives her expert blue-pencil treatment. She is absolutely brilliant at finding typos and making repairs to my run-on sentences and confusing prose. She is my secret weapon and I’d be lost without her.

Thanks for reading,

Mike Rose