After all these years, David Copperfield is still the biggest name in magic. But he’s not resting on laurels. He continues to astound in his live spectacular at MGM Grand, and the illustrious illusionist raised the stakes recently with the release of David Copperfield’s History of Magic, an epic account of the evolution of his art form showcasing the most influential and groundbreaking magicians and artifacts throughout time. Full of never-before-seen images and detailed stories, the book was inspired by Copperfield’s private museum in Las Vegas, known to only a few lucky souls as the International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts, holding more than 80,000 pieces of memorabilia collected over the course of his singular career.
Congratulations on the book! Was this project something you’d been developing for a long time?
In a way. This museum has been almost 30 years of my life. It’s a secret museum, because of all the secrets involved, and people get to tour it by invitation only. So, the book is a way of allowing other people to see this amazing place and some of the highlights, with beautiful pictures. But the book itself is only two or three years in the making because I was searching for another way to share this place. It’s a very rich history, and I’m really proud of it.
You know more about magic than anyone, but was there anything that you learned or rediscovered while you were compiling the material for the book?
I was more of a creator than a historian for decades, inventing new magic, making giant objects disappear, walking through walls, traveling around the world trying to break the mold of what magic was. My current show at MGM is about dinosaurs and spaceships, aliens and time travel, things that don’t exist in any of these amazing volumes in the library here. My real effort in life was to move magic forward, and I didn’t look back. Then, 20 years ago, I acquired a collection of things just to kind of rescue it and keep it together, and I started learning about the stories of these magicians, and suddenly it was vibrant. Stories are very important to me. We learn from stories. We learn from our past. So, in the last 20 years, I’ve been looking back as well as looking forward, and it was very enjoyable to relearn all this stuff, and through the book, I found out some incredible things I didn’t know.
Since reopening your show at MGM Grand, you’ve been back onstage for 15 performances every week. What’s the secret behind that incredible consistency?
I take no days off during the weeks I work, then I take 10 separate weeks off during the year and it’s a great balance for me. I get to re-energize during those breaks, but while I’m here I like to work. I do three shows Saturdays and two shows every other day. But the audience is the reason I’m there. I enjoy them, I enjoy the experience, and if I wasn’t having a good time, I wouldn’t do it. It’s very rewarding. I’ve been doing meet-and-greets in a different way now where I’m doing a little command performance backstage, and I look forward to it. I get to do a piece of new material to test for that group backstage and it’s really fun, and they’re happy about it, too.
MGM Grand, 866.740.7711
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