Alexander's Original Luminous Ouiji Divining Board

Here is an ad that manages to do it's job a century later- I wanted one of these tremendously on first read! I would even settle for a photograph of one!

I couldn't find anyone selling or even mentioning the board anywhere, so I went to an Ouija Board expert. I emailed the awesome Gene, who runs the Museum of Talking Boards to see if he could pinpoint which board Alexander was selling. I was really surprised at what Gene was able to find- and now I know why you don't see many any of these boards anywhere:

Alexander’s Original Luminous Ouiji Divining Board was made by magician Claude Alexander Conlin (Alexander--the Man Who Knows) and sold exclusively through his Los Angeles publishing house during the 1920s. It wasn’t available through stores and that is why it is so rare and seldom seen today. What made this item special was the planchette, which was in the shape and image of Alexander’s head. It worked as a writing planchette if you inserted the pencil as the third leg and wrote on a sheet of paper, or as a regular message indicator if you replaced the pencil with the matching leg and used the supplied letter and number board.

The letter and number board was fairly unremarkable except for the glowing luminous spot in the center. The luminous spot was supposed to aid spirit communication and make the “conditions” right. What this spot was made of I can only guess but I suspect that it was radium which was used at the time to make paint glow in the dark. If this was true then it added a whole new meaning to dangerous Ouija sessions.

So if anyone has a planchette in the shape of Alexander's head, you have something special. If you have a board that glows in the center, you might need to see your doctor.

Here is the second section of the advertisement- which hilariously appears just below the top portion, only the entire thing is too long to fit in my scanner, so I had to split it into two parts:

Thank you again, Gene for being so quick with this information!