In-Person Talk!

The Peculiar Story of Doesticks and the Fortunetellers 

Rockwell Gallery at The Salmagundi Club

47 Fifth Avenue (at 12th Street)

New York, NY 10003

Free Tickets Here!!

Who knows what the future holds? Well, on March 7, we’re co-sponsoring a talk about 19th-century NYC fortune tellers with The Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, the Salmagundi Club Library Committee, and Merchant’s House Museum! Author Marie Carter will introduce us to Q. K. Philander Doesticks, P.B. (real name, Mortimer Thomson), a reporter for The New-York Tribune who in 1857 investigated the fortune tellers of the Lower East Side and eventually wrote a book about them, The Witches of New York. When his articles were published in book form in 1858, they catalyzed a series of arrests that both scandalized and delighted the public. But Mortimer was guarding some secrets of his own, and in many ways, his own life paralleled the lives of the women he visited and vilified. This talk, in celebration of the release of Carter’s book Mortimer & the Witches: A Nineteenth-Century History of Fortune Telling (Fordham University Press), leads us into the world of Doesticks, who hobnobbed with literary luminaries of his time like Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, the wildly popular columnist Fanny Fern, and biographer James Parton. The talk will also examine some of the stories of those supposedly “evil” fortune tellers who showed up in the press in surprising ways.

Marie Carter is an New York City-based writer and tour guide who hails from Scotland. She works with Boroughs of the Dead, an NYC walking tour company that specializes in macabre, strange, and ghostly histories. Her most recent book, Mortimer and the Witches, will be published by Fordham University Press in March 2024. She is also the author of The Trapeze Diaries and Holly’s Hurricane, a historical novel set in the future.

📷 Madame Morrow’s Fortune Telling Cards, 1886, New-York Historical Society, The Liman Collection.

📷 Courtesy of Marie Carter and Fordham University Press.