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The collection will be available to scholars and will be used in future exhibitions, including one slated for 2017, museum spokesperson Catherine Guex said.

The artifacts trace Houdini’s beginnings as a magician in eastern Canada, but also the rise of spiritualism – the belief that the dead can communicate with the living. It also “tracks the social history of advertising” through the use of lithography and its posters, Ben said.

But the chronicling of the city’s “social history” is compelling too, Ben said. After all, “Houdini played in theatres in Montreal that are no longer standing.”

The acquisition is the gift of the Emmanuelle Gattuso Foundation.

Emmanuelle Gattuso is the Montreal-born wife of Allan Slaight, who sold his Standard Broadcasting media company to Astral Media in 2007. Before Slaight started his media career in the 1960s, he was a professional magician and mind reader.