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It sounds fantastical enough to have been created by Terry Pratchett or J.K. Rowling, but the Conjuring Arts Research Center is very much real, and one of the world's greatest collections of books dedicated to the deceptive arts.
Conjuring Arts may be hard to find, but it is located in the heart of New York's magic community. A few blocks northeast is Tannen's, the oldest operating magic shop in the city, and a few blocks to the west is Fantasma, a magic store home to the largest Houdini museum in the world. One of the people on the Center's Board of Directors is Brooklyn-born magician David Blaine.
The not-for-profit organization was established in 2003, "dedicated to the preservation and interpretation of magic and its allied arts." It was started by William Kalush, who developed a love of magic from the card tricks shown to him by his father, a Marine wounded in World War II. This love of card magic turned to a love of collecting magic books, which now form a wondrous collection of over 15,000 books—some dating to over 600 years old—housed in this hidden location.
[...] But these magic books aren't just secreted away. Above all, the Conjuring Arts Research Center was set up to be a practical resource. "I wanted a place that was available for anyone with an appointment, to be able to come in and find some of the rarest material," says Kalush. A large part of the organization's work is sourcing these forgotten treasures, preserving them, and making them available to magicians and scholars.
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(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 10 2017, @09:32PM
I find it extremely unsettling for anyone to compare the creations of Terry Pratchett with those of JK Rowling. I love them both, but they are fundamentally different in my head.
For instance there's something that's stuck in my head: JK Rowling is the best sold author in the UK, T Pratchett is the most shop-lifted. I don't know why, but it feels like this is a battle that Terry won.