"Gilded Age Magic" at Hudson River Museum, and Golf Auctions The magician Howard Thurston was so renowned in his day that when he died in 1936, at 66, a newspaper published a cartoon of him bidding farewell to wistful children learning the mechanics of card tricks, disappearing rabbits and spookily hovering spheres. His competitor Harry Houdini has since eclipsed Thurston, but a magician in Brooklyn named Rory Feldman is trying to remedy that. Mr. Feldman, 31, has been tracking down Thurston memorabilia for two decades. The current object count in his apartment and assorted storage spaces is over 30,000. He lives with his girlfriend, Cara Bedick, and they have allotted an entire man-cave bedroom and a third of the living room to neatly organized and brightly lighted Thurston displays. There is some overflow at his mother's apartment nearby. He sometimes acquires 1,000 pieces a month. On May 26 "Gilded Age Magic," an exhibition about Thurston and his circle, goes on view at the Hudson River Museum in Yonkers with loans from Mr. Feldman and a fellow obsessed collector, Bjorn Hanson, a hospitality management professor at New York University. Thurston's black waistcoat and top hat and his female assistants" costumes trimmed in rhinestones are hung beside his "spirit cabinet," a walk-in armoire painted teal and crimson, with a secret back trapdoor. The museum has also brought out giant ads for his mentors and rivals, and explained how they all concealed their humble family origins. Thurston was from a working-class background in Columbus, Ohio. He studied with a Yonkers magician, Harry Kellar, who was born Heinrich Keller to German immigrants in Erie, Pa. Another Kellar protégé, William E. Robinson, renamed himself Achmed Ben Ali and then Chung Ling Soo, despite his New York origins. Robinson refused to speak English in public and claimed to have spirited himself away from torture and an assassination attempt during the Boxer Rebellion in China. In his traveling show he and his assistants enacted a Boxer Rebellion firing-squad scene, and he pretended to catch the bullets. But on a March night in 1918, the trick went wrong. He was fatally shot, and called for the curtain to be lowered as he lay dying. "Apparently the soldering inside the gun got loose over the years," said Laura L. Vookles, the Yonkers exhibition's main curator. In the museum galleries posters show Robinson studying his trade with ancient Chinese mystics, and red imps whispering into Thurston's ear. "He's not in league with the Devil," Mr. Feldman said during a recent tour of the Thurston trove in his apartment. Thurston's listening to imps, Mr. Feldman added, "is how he learns his secrets." Mr. Feldman owns stacks of Thurston correspondence, memoirs, business ledgers, film reels and light bulbs jiggered to hold live canaries. He also seeks out Thurston's inventions unrelated to magic; Thurston would hand out advertising cards at his shows for "perfect breathers," wire loops meant for widening nostrils and preventing snoring. The Feldman collection can be as mundane as lumber and garage bills for Thurston's Mystic Palace in the Cos Cob neighborhood of Greenwich, Conn., and as eerie as a red velvet hat with black horns that Thurston wore to meetings of a magicians" association called the Demons Club. Mr. Feldman is trying to set up a Museum of Magic in New York, to house the collection. The project feels predestined, he said; he has found references in correspondence from Thurston's daughter, Jane, that she too had hoped to establish a Museum of Magic. The other major lender to the Yonkers show, Mr. Hanson, started collecting in the 1970s and has hung tiers of magician posters on his Manhattan apartment walls. The museum has borrowed his rare ads with scenes of Thurston peering into skull props, Kellar seemingly decapitating himself and Chung Ling Soo flaunting his "10 assistants" (his fingers). Mr. Hanson said in a recent phone interview that his family planned to keep a few posters eventually, but that the bulk of the collection would be sold. "I hope they will be made available to people who've been waiting days or months or years or decades," he said. Golf gear for the earliest players does not look like much to the uninitiated. But specialist collectors pay thousands of dollars apiece for equipment dating to the 1700s, especially tattered leather balls stuffed with feathers and crudely forged iron clubs. The market for such artifacts emerged in the 1980s, and now the first generation of buyers are selling off their holdings. Two major clusters are breaking up at auctions this spring. Dr. Barry Glaser, a retired surgeon in Philadelphia who maintained a private golf museum at his home, is nearly finished selling his collection through Heritage Auctions in Dallas. On May 4 his 19th-century feather golf balls and dinged iron clubs brought up to $9,560 each. Previews start on Saturday at Christie's in London for 347 lots of memorabilia that the tin tycoon Jaime Ortiz-Patiño had long displayed at the Valderrama golf resort in Sotogrande, Spain. Estimates range from under $100 for putters dating to the 1880s to over $400,000 each for the painter John Lavery's two early-1900s scenes of Scottish seacoast links. A survey of works by Lavery and his circle, "The Art of Golf," is on view through June 24 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Mr. Ortiz-Patiño has also consigned crank-operated 1860s machines (about $40,000 each) for stamping dimples on golf balls, and ceramic plates depicting aristocrats on the greens with their caddies (about $100 each). Dr. Glaser had similar tastes in knickknacks: his ceramic jugs, steins and vases with cartoons of golfers brought up to $4,780 each on May 4. As the "80s collectors have left the field, replacements are emerging in China and South Korea. Display cases at golf clubhouses there are starting to fill with antiques, said Edward Monagle, a golf memorabilia expert at Christie's. Valderrama's shelves for the Ortiz-Patiño pieces have already been restocked. A club member has handed over "old golf paintings, original manuscripts with the original rules of golf and other golfing memorabilia," the club's general manager, Javier Reviriego, wrote in an e-mail.