Thanks for all the very kind comments. Truly appreciated! In case you don't get Marshall Petersen's H & R Newsletter (which announced the retail shop closing and associated sale), here are the comments from me in it that he used, which includes a condensed history of our business:
When I decided to move to my hometown of Logan, Utah in the Fall of 2010, to be closer to my parents as they got older, I also decided not to take the H & R Magic Book business with me. To be honest, I was looking for a change and I didn’t look forward to transporting and warehousing all those books as part of move. It was enough just moving my own library! Charlie and I began to look for someone to take over the business that we had built up over many years. It had originally begun as a small cooperative book buying venture so that Charlie and I could satisfy our appetite for magic books by purchasing them on wholesale terms, then we began to purchase magicians’ libraries, starting with that of Wayne Raeke, but since we both had many of those books already, we began distributing lists of used and new books. Our growing mail order venture, working out of both our houses, took a giant leap when we purchased the enormous book inventory of Micky Hades’ Seattle Magic Center. That required a warehouse and we eventually moved into “brick and mortar” space in Humble, Texas over a tennis shop. Our friend Joe Anderson built wonderful wooden shelves to house the inventory and we hired assistants to process orders from our then new website (
http://www.magicbookshop.com) designed by Bryce Kuhlman. Thanks to our friend, the late Charlie Buckner, we were introduced to the German mentalist Satori at the FISM Congress in Dresden, Germany and soon thereafter published our first book under the H & R imprint, an English language edition of Satori’s
Making Contact. Charlie handled all the publishing details and I supervised the shop. Thanks to Jerry Sadowitz, we were put in touch with a then little known mentalist/magician in England, Derren Brown, and published the American editions of his first two books,
Pure Magic and
Absolute Magic. Numerous other titles followed, most recently the multivolume Nick Trost books that Charlie continues to produce. Over the years we made many, many friends through our business, and were pleased to meet many in person at the conventions where we exhibited our wares. Among those who deserve special mention for being supportive of our company over the years, I’d like to mention Max Maven, Stephen Minch, Stan Allen, Alan Howard, the late John Moehring and the late Barrie Richardson. There are many others, of course, and I apologize to the many I should have mentioned and didn’t! Among those who worked for us, some have gone on to fame and success in the world of magic, including Ricky Smith and Jeff Copeland. Shane Wilson continues to work with Charlie on book design issues and deserves special thanks. Marshall Petersen worked for us as our full-time shop manager for an extended period, commuting from his home near Beaumont, Texas about an hour away from our shop (which had moved by then to a ground floor location, walking distance from the Humble post office). Marshall was an excellent employee and when word got out that we were looking for someone to take over our retail book business due to my move, he stepped forward. While we are disappointed that the company is now closing, we fully understand the circumstances that led to this decision and support Marshall in making it. We thank him for keeping us informed about the business over the decade that he has run the company and wish him only the best in his future endeavors. Of course, Charlie will continue to produce new books under the H & R Magic Books imprint. Charlie will be attending the FFFF convention this weekend and we’ll both be attending the Magic Collectors’ Expo in Minneapolis in June ([url]magiccollectorsexpo.com[/url]). We hope to see some of you at our booth there. I’ll be attending the Science of Magic Conference in Chicago in July ([url]scienceofmagicassoc.org[/url]) and Charlie and I will both be attending Magic Live in Las Vegas in August and the Genii Convention in October. We look forward to seeing many of you at those.
Thank you for all your support of both Charlie and me over the years and more recently of Marshall.
Sincerely,
Richard Hatch, the “H” of “H & R Magic Books”