"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."
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