Magician's letters to be kept safe and secure

SLEIGHT OF HAND: Magician Francis Haxton performs a card trick for Prince Philip and Louis Mountbatten at The Magic Circle headquarters in London sometime in the late 1940s early 1950s.

A small nondescript courier package containing assorted letters will shortly be making its way from Paraparaumu to New York.

Staff at the not-for-profit Conjuring Arts Research Center will delicately handle the package's letters and methodically examine them, before carefully preserving them in the center.

The letters belonged to my late grandfather, Francis Haxton, a notable world-class card magician, who lived in London and then Leicester.

The centre's founder and executive director William Kalush got in touch with me via local magician Anton van Helden, to see if my mother Marian Haxton, Francis' daughter, would consider offering it any of Francis' correspondence that she still holds.

"We have a sincere interest in it and we can assure you that we would expend the considerable resources needed to preserve and make it selectively available to scholars and researchers," William wrote to my mother.

The centre already has about 930 letters to and from Francis in its collection, which have been carefully catalogued, scanned and in many cases made available via the search engine Ask Alexander.

Many of those 930 letters are between Francis and Stewart James, a Canadian magician who was one of magic's most prolific inventors.

Most of Francis Haxton's library of magic books and letters went to The Magic Circle Library in London not long after his death in 1995, but these remaining letters and articles of his will be well looked after by the Manhattan-based Conjuring Arts, an important cultural centre whose mission is to preserve and make available materials related to magicians and conjuring.

The center has between 25,000 and 30,000 letters from magicians in its holdings.

It's also important to note the historical importance of letter correspondence, which wouldn't have been on Francis' radar at the time.