This special opportunity to explore John Gaughan’s shop of illusions in Los Angeles will be available to you and your friends at a pre-arranged time with Mr. Gaughan. John Gaughan’s shop is a veritable cornucopia of magical apparati and automatons in Los Angeles spanning nearly five centuries of magic history. He has been featured in the New York Times, BBC News, LA Weekly and Beyond. Alongside band saws and piles of lumber are thousands of illusions – one of the world’s best collections of magic from the past 200 years. There are “wands, collapsing cages (that do, in fact, go up one’s sleeve), Houdini’s handcuffs, spirit bells, visages of the magician’s muse, Mephistopheles, a purse-sized blunderbuss, handbills from music-hall magic shows in London and Paris, and spring-loaded devices of all sizes and shapes.”

Though Mr. Gaughan’s collection is typically not seen by the public, this opportunity is a rare chance to see his many artifacts, including the infamous Mechnical Turk, the 1700s chess-playing automaton that rarely lost a game, and even trounced Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte (according to legend). Though the Turk was destroyed by fire in 1854, Mr Gaughan was able to retrieve a couple of pieces that survived and spent decades reconstructing a working replica.

“There are 8 or 10 people that build illusions,” said Mr. Jim Steinmeyer, who is the author of “Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear.” “To me, what’s unique about John is his interest in historical work.”

John has spent most of his life creating large-scale illusions for many of the world’s most famous magicians and illusionists: Siegfried & Roy, David Blaine, Criss Angel, David Copperfield, Doug Henning, Mark Wilson, Ricky Jay. He has also created stage illusions for entertainers Jim Morrison, Elton John, Michael Jackson, Alice Cooper, Barbra Streisand, Cher.