Perhaps most important to his growing publishing reputation in the literature of legerdemain was issuing a multivolume series called the Tarbell Course in Magic. Louis Tannen became a manufacturer, first of inexpensive pocket tricks, then of the priciest stage-scale illusions. When the Wurlitzer Building was torn down, Tannen’s brother and partner, Irv Tannen, quipped, “We’re not that great magicians, to keep ourselves suspended in midair.” There, in the first of his shops located above street level, foot traffic vanished but cognoscenti ascended to view the latest innovations in the practice of magic. In 1941, Tannen moved again to the Wurlitzer Building. By the middle of the next decade, he moved the store to 52nd Street near Stillman’s Gym. Louis Tannen, a kinetic redhead, founded The Nat Louis Fun Shop in Brooklyn in the 1920s next to the Fabian Fox Theater at Nevins Street and Flatbush Avenue. For decades, Tannen’s and Flosso-Hornman-Martinka shops coexisted with the mildest of rivalries.Al Flosso affectionately called Lou Tannen “kid,” recalled writer Robert Reiss, who at one time worked for both stores. continues in its present incarnation in cyberspace, the mantle of New York’s oldest physical shop is now affixed to Tannen’s Magic, begun in 1925.Tannen’s,the business that was once the new kid on the block among magic dealers, today finds itself the last remnant among New York’s top-tier magic emporia. – is spitting distance from the final premises of the Flosso-Hornman-Martinka store, which served magicians since just after the Civil War and of which Houdini was president in 1919.Īlthough Martinka & Co. This locus of hocus pocus – “Suite 608” at 45 West 34th St. Call it a peregrination of prestidigitators.
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