This excursion into the history of bizarre entertainments includes armless calligraphers, mathematical dogs, tightrope-walking fleas and assorted quacks, flimflammers and charlatans of spectacle.

Originally published: New York: Times Books, 1979.

A popular magician offers a guide to the most exotic entertainers in the history of showbusiness--from the amazing feats of handicapped individuals to the unusual talents of trained animals

A tongue-in-cheek look at the newest method of self-defense details the history of card-throwing, exercises to improve your throwing ability, and fantastic stunts

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.

Plato said God invented dice. This we learn from one of the fascinating essays, which take readers from the origins of dice to the myriad forms of cheating throughout history. Rosamond Purcell's luminous photographs transform dice made from unstable celluloid into an art form.

This book discusses calendar or seasonal anomalies in worldwide equity markets as well as arbitrage and risk arbitrage. A complete update of US anomalies such as the January turn-of-the year, turn-of-the-month, January barometer, sell in May and go away, holidays, days of the week, options expiry and other effects is given concentrating on the futures markets where these anomalies can be easily applied. Other effects that lend themselves to modified buy and hold cash strategies include the presidential election and factor models based on fundamental anomalies. The ideas have been used successfully by the author in personal and managed accounts and hedge funds.

Profiles unique entertainers, including musical prodigies, cannon-ball catchers, conmen, card cheats, and other side-show performers and oddities.

This book is framed as a memoir of the author’s journey through a cancer diagnosis and resulting impairments, as he continued his teaching and research activities during and after medical procedures. The narrative weaves together theoretical debates, textual analyses, and ethnographic data from communicative practices to redefine language competence. The book demonstrates: the generative and resistant value of human vulnerability the importance of vulnerability in motivating engagement with social networks and material ecologies for productive thinking, communication, and community the role of relational ethics in social and communicative life a decolonizing orientation to disability studies and language competence. While language competence was traditionally defined as mentally internalized grammatical knowledge for individual mastery of communication, this book demonstrates the need for distributed, ethical, and embodied practice. The book is intended for graduate students and researchers in language and literacy studies. It would interest scholars outside these disciplines to understand what language studies can offer to address the role of disabilities, impairments, and debilities in embodied communication and thinking. In the context of the global pandemic, compounded by environmental catastrophes and structural injustices which disproportionately affect marginalized communities, the book helps readers treat human vulnerability as the starting point for ethical social relations, strategic communication, and transformative education.

Published to accompany the exhibition "Wordplay: Matthais Buchinger's inventive drawings from the collection of Ricky Jay" held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, January 5-April 11, 2016.