Talma

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

This stop features Talma, Queen of Coins, a circa 1905–1906 piece billed as “Queen of Coins.”

An enormous right hand rises from a dark ruffled sleeve into a field of orange and yellow. Silver coins appear to hang in the air around the fingers. The composition gives a small object the scale of a grand illusion: a single hand occupies almost the entire poster. At the top, a rooster sits inside the first letter of Comedians de Mephisto. Below, Talma's name and her title, Queen of Coins, tell us whose skill we are looking at.

The lithographic printing house of Adolph Friedländer in Hamburg produced this design, numbered 3430. The individual artist is not identified; the Reed College exhibition catalogue explicitly lists the artist as unknown. This is color stone lithography in the exuberant tradition of music-hall advertising, with modeled shading on the hand, saturated background color, and large display lettering. The elegant sleeve suggests refinement, while the magnified fingers advertise dexterity as the central attraction.

The surviving sheet is overprinted for Queen's Theatre, Longton, and offers six nights beginning Monday, November 26. The date line supplies no year. Auction catalogues place the design around 1905 to 1906. These practical additions show how a touring company's reusable image became an advertisement for one particular town. The photograph at Poe's reproduces this same Longton version.

Talma was the stage name of the English magician Mary Ann Ford. With her husband, the Belgian illusionist Servais Le Roy, and the comic performer billed as Bosco, she belonged to the celebrated company Le Roy, Talma and Bosco, also advertised as the Comedians de Mephisto. She was a featured sleight-of-hand performer in her own right, especially admired for coin manipulation.

Her coin productions included the kind of seemingly inexhaustible supply associated with the Miser's Dream. The advertisement makes the labor behind that elegance its selling point. At a time when women in magic publicity were frequently shown being vanished, levitated, or otherwise subjected to somebody else's miracle, Talma's hand is doing the impossible. The coins are merely keeping up.