Extraordinary Exhibitions: Broadsides from the Collection of Ricky Jay - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1593720122 ISBN 13: 9781593720124

Publisher: Quantuck Lane Press, 2005

Synopsis

An informal history of sensational, scientific, silly, satisfying, and startling attractions based on seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth-century broadsides from Ricky Jay's extraordinary collection.

It includes observations on the convention of promoting such appearances, digressions on the manner and method of printing advertisements to do so, and insights into the psychology employed to that end. All are compiled in a monograph that is itself a shameless attempt to entertain and elucidate.

It is the contention of the author that neither the tongue of the most florid orator, nor pen of the most ingenious writer, can sufficiently describe the elegance, symmetry, and prodigious accomplishments of those who pass in review within these pages

Included are broadsides advertising: an armless dulcimer player, a ghost showman, a singing mouse, a chess-playing automaton, a cannon ball juggler, an African hermaphrodite, a chicken incubator, a rabbi with prodigious memory, a ventriloquist, a spirit medium, a glass blower, a woman magician, a speaking machine, a mermaid, a bullet catcher, a flea circus, and an equestrian bee keeper. Illustrated throughout

About this title

About the Author

Ricky Jay is one of the world's great sleight-of-hand artists and an expert on the world of fantastic entertainment. His award-winning one-man shows were directed by David Mamet, in whose many films Mr. Jay has appeared. He is author of New York Times Notable Books Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women, Jay's Journal of Anomalies, Extraordinary Exhibitions, and Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck with Rosamond Purcell. He lives in Los Angeles.

Reviews

This oversize, richly illustrated and well-annotated book could emerge from none other than Jay—showman, card shark, actor, curator and wondrously quirky cultural presence. The author of Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women likes to collect showbills, those exuberant advertisements for singular, often questionable entertainers, and the ones presented here—in Italian, French, German and English—vividly depict the sideshow mentalitywith idiosyncratic graphics and "florid, orotund language." The collection parallels Jay's interest in both deception and unusual acts, beginning with the "Learned Horse" in Milan, circa 1618, which collected money and fetched wine, and ending with Cinquevalli, "King of the Jugglers," who dazzled 1898 Birkenhead, England, with his skill manipulating cannonballs and pool balls. In between,readers meet "the greatest German living," a 29-inch wonder; the equestrian apiarist who wore a "bee blindfold"; the now-notorious "Hottentot Venus"; the "giant Hungarian schoolboy" and many others. Jay's collection was first exhibited at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. As the center's chief curator says, the pieces stand up both as "historically worthy art and little time bombs of insight." Oh, and that Whimsiphusicon? It's a "theatrical neologism used to entice, or more likely confuse, the public." Indeed. (July)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Quantuck Lane Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1593720122
• ISBN 13: 9781593720124
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176
• Editor: Jay Ricky