Sunday, March 18, 2012

Kellar









I found these lithographic images in a file of Performing Arts Posters on the more or less infinitely bountiful website maintained (with our tax dollars, ritually deplored by the Republicans) by the Prints & Photographs section of the Library of Congress. They document the career of stage magician Harry Kellar (1849-1922). Elderly, bald & formally attired, he cultivated his own primeval pop-culture version of sympathy for the Devil. These examples date from the 1890s.