McCOMB, Billy (1922 – 2006). Coin in the Bottle Moveable Souvenir Card Mock-Up. Circa 1960. Hand-colored prototype or mock-up for a souvenir brochure advertising McComb’s services as a magician, the front panel with a cellophane-covered cut-out window framed by a bottle-like design. Inside the window sits – impossibly – an old English penny. Pulling on a tab below reveals a photographic bust portrait of McComb inside the bottle, below a caption reading “Can you do the impossible?” Opening the card reveals the tag line, “Nothing is impossible with Billy McComb … “ and a further panel reveals his address on Allum Lane, Elstree, and the name of the designer of the card. Height 7”. From McComb’s own files, and likely a unique object as the finished cards were, to our knowledge, never produced. Even on large stages, when performing in theaters and on cruise ships, McComb made a feature of what is by all measures a close-up trick: the Coin in the Bottle. Using a volunteer from the audience as a representative of the larger audience, the trick of pushing a borrowed coin inside a glass bottle, and then removing it, became a regular feature of McComb’s humorous shows, and perhaps the most talked-about routine he presented, as this remarkable and clever souvenir card shows.