Magic has enchanted humankind for millennia, evoking terror, laughter, shock, and amazement. Once persecuted as heretics and sorcerers, magicians have always been conduits to a parallel universe of limitless possibility-whether invoking spirits, reading minds, or inverting the laws of nature by sleight of hand. Long before science fiction, virtual realities, video games, and the Internet, the craft of magic was the most powerful fantasy world man had ever known. As the pioneers of special effects throughout history, magicians have never ceased to mystify us by making the impossible possible. This book celebrates more than 500 years of the stunning visual culture of the world's greatest magicians. Featuring more than 750 rarely seen vintage posters, photographs, handbills, and engravings as well as paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and Bruegel among others, The Magic Book traces the history of magic as a performing art from the 1400s to the 1950s. Combining sensational images with incisive text, the book explores the evolution of the magicians' craft, from medieval street performers to the brilliant stage magicians who gave rise to cinematic special effects; from the 19th century's golden age of magic to groundbreaking daredevils like Houdini and the early 20th century's vaudevillians.

Magic has enchanted humankind for millennia, evoking terror, laughter, shock, and amazement. Once persecuted as heretics and sorcerers, magicians have always been conduits to a parallel universe of limitless possibility-whether invoking spirits, reading minds, or inverting the laws of nature by sleight of hand. Long before science fiction, virtual realities, video games, and the Internet, the craft of magic was the most powerful fantasy world man had ever known. As the pioneers of special effects throughout history, magicians have never ceased to mystify us by making the impossible possible. This book celebrates more than 500 years of the stunning visual culture of the world's greatest magicians. Featuring more than 750 rarely seen vintage posters, photographs, handbills, and engravings as well as paintings by Hieronymus Bosch and Bruegel among others, Magic traces the history of magic as a performing art from the 1400s to the 1950s. Combining sensational images with incisive text, the book explores the evolution of the magicians' craft, from medieval street performers to the brilliant stage magicians who gave rise to cinematic special effects; from the 19th century's golden age of magic to groundbreaking daredevils like Houdini and the early 20th century's vaudevillians.

One of the New York Times's "Notable Books" and a Los Angeles Times "Best Book of the Year": Ricky Jay's brilliant excursion into the history of bizarre entertainments. Ingesters of stones, stoats, and swords have long compelled my attention. Signor Hervio Nano, the fantastic homunculus, defied conventional taxonomy. The well-trained flea has shown sufficient rationality to drive a chariot, impersonate Napoleon, or reenact the siege of Antwerp. Note the enduring popularity of severing from the head its most protuberant organthe nose. The Bonassus, advertised as unique, was in 1821 the most numerous hoofed quadruped on the face of the earth. In an era rich in examples of animal scholarship, Munito was a star. The multitalented Ricky Jay (sleight-of-hand artist, actor, author, and scholar of the unusual) wrote and published a unique and beautifully designed quarterly called Jay's Journal of Anomalies. Already coveted collector's items, the sixteen issues are now gathered here in a complete set, with significant new material and illustrations. A brilliant excursion into the history of bizarre entertainments, the journal was described in The New York Times as "beautiful and elegant...a combination of rigorous scholarship and personal rumination." In a delectably deadpan and winning style, Jay conveys his admiration and affection for the offbeat that characterized his best-selling Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women. The journal covers such subjects as dogs stealing acts from other dogs, an anthropological hoax involving the only survivors of a caste of ancient Aztec priests, and the ultimate diet: eating nothing at all. Jay explains how wags since the sixteenth century have cheated at bowling; he explores the ancient relationship between conjuring and dentistry; and he chronicles the exploits of ceiling walkers and human flies. Crammed full of illustrations drawn from the author's massive personal archives, Jay's Journal of Anomalies will baffle, instruct, and, above all, delight. 150 illustrations.

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.

Plato said God invented dice. This we learn from one of Ricky Jay's fascinating essays in a delightful small volume that takes us from the earliest forms (astragalithe heel bones of hoofed quadrupeds, four of whose six sides were used for gaming) to the myriad types of "loading" and other means of cheating with dice in the modern era. Along the way we discover that Augustus, Caligula, and Nero were all inveterate players, that Queen Elizabeth issued a search and seizure order against the manufacture of false dice in 1598, and that dice made from celluloid, invented in 1869, remained stable for decades, and thenin a flashbegan to decompose. These are the dice of Rosamond Purcell's luminous and seductive photographs, images which transform entropy to an art form. Jay and Purcell give us a dual meditation on dice that will educate us and amuse us at the same time. 13 color photographs.