Cover Image

Celebrations of curious characters

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

Main Author:	Jay, Ricky.
Format:	Books Print Book
Language:	English
Published:	San Francisco, Calif. : McSweeney's Books, c2011.
Subjects:	Curiosities and wonders. Abnormalities, Human. Animals > Abnormalities.

Summary:	Profiles unique entertainers, including musical prodigies, cannon-ball catchers, conmen, card cheats, and other side-show performers and oddities.
Item Description:	"For more than twenty years Ricky Jay has chronicled the exploits of remarkable and eccentric characters, a fascinating and forgotten pantheon of conmen and conjurers, academic animals, and rogues and rapscallions. Roll up, roll up... They're all on the inside!"--p.4 of cover. Includes index.
Physical Description:	111 p. : ill. (some col.) ; 25 cm.
ISBN:	9781936365036 1936365030
Author Notes:	Ricky Jay was born Richard Jay Potash in Brooklyn, New York in 1948. He first performed magic in public at the age of 4. At the age of 7, he appeared on a television show called Time for Pets, plopping a guinea pig into a top hat and appearing to turn it into a chicken. He left home as a teenager and worked at Lake George and at the Electric Circus. He appeared in about 40 movies and television shows including House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, Redbelt, State and Main, Tomorrow Never Dies, Boogie Nights, and Deadwood. In the 1990s, he and Michael Weber founded the consulting firm Deceptive Practices. Their film-industry projects included a wheelchair that made Gary Sinise's Vietnam War-veteran character in Forrest Gump appear to be a double amputee. Jay wrote several books including Cards as Weapons, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, Celebrations of Curious Characters, and Matthias Buchinger: The Greatest German Living. He died on November 24, 2018 at the age of 70. (Bowker Author Biography)

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