Dice: Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck - Hardcover

Ricky Jay; Rosamond Wolff Purcell

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0971454817 ISBN 13: 9780971454811

Publisher: Quantuck Lane Pr & the Mill rd, 2002

Synopsis

Plato said God invented dice. This we learn from one of Ricky Jay's fascinating essays in a delightful small volume that takes us from the earliest forms (astragalithe heel bones of hoofed quadrupeds, four of whose six sides were used for gaming) to the myriad types of "loading" and other means of cheating with dice in the modern era. Along the way we discover that Augustus, Caligula, and Nero were all inveterate players, that Queen Elizabeth issued a search and seizure order against the manufacture of false dice in 1598, and that dice made from celluloid, invented in 1869, remained stable for decades, and thenin a flashbegan to decompose. These are the dice of Rosamond Purcell's luminous and seductive photographs, images which transform entropy to an art form. Jay and Purcell give us a dual meditation on dice that will educate us and amuse us at the same time. 13 color photographs.

About this title

About the Author

Ricky Jay is perhaps best known as a sleight-of-hand performer whose one-man display of talent set a record as the fastest selling show in off-Broadway history. He is also an actor, a scholar, and the author of highly popular books including the best-selling Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women and, most recently, Jay's Journal of Anomalies. Rosamond Wolff Purcell's beautiful photographs of the strange and unusual have appeared in countless publications and have been collected in museums throughout the world. Among her many books are Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters, Finders Keepers: Eight Collectors, and Crossing Over: Where Art and Science Meet, the latter two with Stephen Jay Gould.

Reviews

Ricky Jay knows his dice. A sleight-of-hand-performer who is appearing on Broadway in On the Stem, a one-man show directed by David Mamet (in whose movies Jay has appeared frequently), Jay here presents a light, digressive history of dice, from "astragali" (or "heel bones," as mentioned in an Indian epic poem) to how they are loaded for cheating. Dipping into everything from Viking allegory to the 1820 writings of the Rev. Charles Caleb Colton (an eventual ruined gambler and suicide), Jay's anecdotes are colorful but meandering: a description of a 1501 Florentine gambler named Antonio Rinaldeschi eases into a recollection of the outcry at the Brooklyn Museum over Chris Ofili's dung-festooned Holy Virgin Mary. Chapters such as "Dice and Death" and "The Palengenesis of Craps" are complemented by Rosamond Wolff Purcell's 13 color photographs of beautifully decayed dice (when dice age, they can be chipped and crusted, appearing to be made of salt or ice). These portraits of chance's end reveal visually what Jay tells us verbally: dice are as inherently complex and frail as people.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Quantuck Lane Pr & the Mill rd
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0971454817
• ISBN 13: 9780971454811
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64