Alexander, The Man Who Knows was one of the stage names of Claude Alexander Conlin, born in South Dakota in 1880. Alexander became a highly paid magician and mystic during the first decades of the 20th century, best known for the fortune telling and mind reading act represented here. (He also had a wild reputation as a conman, swindler, and serial husband.) Alexander was especially well positioned to exploit the surge of demand for seers, mystics, and other mediums after World War I as people sought to communicate with those who had died in battle in unprecedented numbers. This is one of numerous high-quality chromolithographic posters, often, like this one, inscribed with the name of a fictitious Indian artist Av Yaga of Bombay, that he had made to promote his act as he toured venues across the United States. In most of them, he also reinforced this entirely fraudulent connection to the traditional spiritualism of the East, often appearing in the headdress that forms a question mark as he gazes into a crystal ball featuring scenes of birth, marriage, and death. Alexander died in Los Angeles in 1954.