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 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 magician himself, the author offers a history of magicians and other performers, including animals trained to do arithmetic and limbless people able to play musical instruments.

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

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

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.

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.

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

I believe hugely in advertising and blowing my own trumpet, beating the gongs, drums, to attract attention to a show, Phineas Taylor Barnum wrote to a publisher in 1860. "I don't believe in 'duping the public,' but I believe in first attracting and then pleasing them." The name P.T. Barnum is virtually synonymous with the fine art of self-advertisement and the apocryphal statement, "There's a sucker born every minute." Nearly a century after his death, Barnum remains one of America's most celebrated figures. In the Selected Letters of P.T. Barnum, A.H. Saxon brings together more than 300 letters written by the self-styled "Prince of Humbugs." Here we see him, opinionated and exuberant, with only the rarest flashes of introspection and self-doubt, haggling with business partners, blustering over politics, and attempting to get such friends as Mark Twain to endorse his latest schemes. Always the king of showmen, Barnum considered himself a museum man first and was forever on the lookout for "curiosities," whether animate or inanimate. His early career included such outright frauds as Joice Heth, the "161-year-old nurse of George Washington," and the Fejee Mermaid-the desiccated head and torso of a monkey sewn to the body of a fish. Although in later years he projected a more solid, respectable image-managing the irreproachable "legitimate" attraction Jenny Lind, becoming a leading light in the temperance crusade, founding the Barnum & Bailey Circus-much of his daily existence continued to be unabashedly devoted to manipulating public opinion so as to acquire for himself and his enterprises what he delightedly termed "notoriety." His famous autobiography, The Life of P.T. Barnum, which he regularly augmented during the last quarter century of his life, was itself a masterpiece of self-promotion. "Will you have the kindness to announce that I am writing my life & that fifty-seven different publishers have applied for the chance of publishing it," he wrote to a newspaper editor, adding, "Such is the fact-and if it wasn't, why still it ain't a bad announcement." The Selected Letters of P.T. Barnum captures the magic of this consummate showman's life, truly his own "greatest show on earth."