✦ Golden Grolla Award 2010

Bill Kalush

The guardian of magic's history

Bill Kalush is the founder and executive director of the Conjuring Arts Research Center in New York, home to one of the most important collections of magic books, manuscripts and documents in the world. Thanks to his work, texts that were once locked away in private collections, some of them centuries old, are preserved, digitised and made available to scholars and magicians, giving the art back its own memory.

A refined card expert with a deep knowledge of sleight of hand and its literature, Kalush is also co-author, with Larry Sloman, of a celebrated biography of Harry Houdini that brought new documents and new questions to the life of the most famous escape artist of all time. As a consultant and collaborator he has worked alongside some of the biggest names in contemporary magic, always with the same mission: connecting today's performers with the centuries of secret knowledge behind them.

Masters of Magic honoured him with the Golden Grolla in 2010, recognising that without the guardians of its history, magic would lose the roots that make it an art.

Honoured by Masters of Magic among the legends who have shaped the history of magic.