Brindamour

Welcome to the Magic Poster Tour at Poe’s Magic Theatre, inside the historic Lord Baltimore Hotel.

This stop features Brindamour and His Great Company, a circa 1900–1910 piece billed as “The World Renowned Magician.”

This horizontal handbill uses heavy black display type, a small portrait, and dense local information. ‘Brindamour’ dominates the center, while the Woonsocket Opera House, dates, and performance times establish the immediate practical purpose.

Cheap monochrome printing did not mean quiet language. The claims are immense, set in typefaces that jostle for attention like barkers outside a fairground. It is advertising designed to work quickly, then disappear.

The displayed item is a reproduction of a local advertising handbill. No year appears on the surviving design, so its date remains approximate.

George Brindamour was an escape artist and magician active around the turn of the twentieth century. He became a prominent competitor of Houdini, performing escapes from restraints, daring bridge jumps, and theatrical illusions.

The handbill offers a reminder that theatrical history is crowded with once-famous names. Brindamour could be billed as world renowned and still require recovery by later collectors, historians, and the occasional unusually persistent hotel theatre.