A Magical Library

 

Ricky Jay (again)

  I have written often about libraries and now this is the third time I will produce something about Ricky Jay. He is the author of Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women: A History of Unique, Eccentric & Amazing Entertainers. That should be enough to get your attention, but, if not, he is also the author of, Matthias Buchinger: The Greatest German Living. Mr. Jay passed away in 2018 and information about his passing and from his website is found here. 

  Apart from practicing magic and writing books, Jay collected them and also gathered all the magical memorabilia he could find. That is why he is again our subject. His lovely and very understanding wife is removing from their home some of the material he collected. There is enough stuff to warrant this article in the New York Times: "The Curious, Astounding Collection of the Magician Ricky Jay: Illusionists, Cardsharps, Charlatans and Human Cannonballs Enliven a Trove of Rare Books, Posters and Ephemera Now Going to Auction at Sotheby's," Dan Barry, Oct. 19. Apart from his legacy as a magician, he also left more than 10,000 rare books, posters, broadsides, handbills and ephemera, a vast collection that transformed his Beverly Hills home into a research library dedicated to the human desire to be fooled — to slip the cuffs of reality and believe, if only briefly, the unbelievable. He knew every item, could recite passages from ancient texts, and incorporated the material into his performances. His collection lived.

    

   When the folks from Sotheby's arrived at the Jay-Verges home, tucked into a hillside off Mulholland Drive, they were taken aback by the size and breadth of the idiosyncratic collection. 

 You will likely be taken aback as well when you view Sotheby's, The Ricky Jay Collection. You have about one week to make your bid for items such as this: Madam Yucca; The Female Hercules.

It is estimated to be sold for between $2000 -3000. If your budget is limited, you can sort the 600+ items from lowest to highest. 

   

RICKY JAY

     Ricky Jay died in Los Angeles on Nov. 24th.  I knew little about him until I did a post about this book which he wrote: Matthias Buchinger: 'The Greatest German Living'. He (Jay) was a very interesting person and you can learn about him quickly by reading this article by Anita Gates: "Ricky Jay, Gifted Magician, Actor and Author, is Dead at 70," New York Times, Nov. 25, 2018. I have also pasted below the biographical information available on his website since it will probably disappear. In some of the interesting articles about him there is mention of the Mulholland Library of Conjuring and the Allied Arts, which should itself be worth a post-or-two.

Ricky Jay: the Serious Bio While Ricky Jay has long been considered one of the world’s great sleight-of-hand artists, his career is further distinguished by the remarkable variety of his accomplishments as an author, actor, historian, and consultant.  His one man show Ricky Jay & His 52 Assistants was directed by David Mamet and garnered for Mr. Jay the Lucille Lortel and Obie Awards for Outstanding Achievement. Subsequent productions were staged at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theater, the Melbourne International Arts Festival, the Tiffany Theater in Los Angeles, The Spoletto Festival in Charleston and the Old Vic in London. His most recent show, Ricky Jay: On the Stem, also directed by Mr. Mamet, just closed a seven-month critically acclaimed run in New York City.

As an actor, Mr. Jay debuted in the Joseph Papp production of Midsummer Night's Dream at the New York Shakespeare Festival. He has appeared in David Mamet's films: House of Games, Homicide, Things Change, Spanish Prisoner, State and Main, and Heist. He can be seen in many other films including Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and the James Bond film, Tomorrow Never Dies. He also starred in the heralded episode of the X-Files, "The Great Maleeni."  A serious student of his art, he has been elected to membership in the American Antiquarian Society for whom he authored Many Mysteries Unraveled: Conjuring Literature in America 1786-1874. He is a contributor to The Cambridge Guide to American Theater and has defined the terms of his art for the Encyclopædia Britannica. Mr. Jay’s book, Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women was published to critical and popular acclaim and was voted one of the outstanding books of the year by the Theater Library Association and one of the "Notable Books of the Year" by The New York Times Book Review, which hailed his work in a rave front page review. As a writer and speaker on subjects as varied as conjuring literature, con games, sense perception and unusual entertainments, Jay has authored numerous articles and has delivered many lecture/ demonstrations. Among his presentations are:  "Sleight and Shadow: at the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. November 22, 2005;  “Belknap Visitor in the Humanities” at Princeton University speaking on the relationship between magicians and mediums on November 21, 2005;  "Doing Likewise: Imitation, Emulation, and Mimesis at the New York Institute of Humanities, hosted by Jonathan Miller;  "Hocus Pocus in Perfection: Four Hundred Years of Conjuring and Conjuring Literature," the Harold Smith Memorial Lecture at Brown University; "Splendors of Decaying Celluloid" with Errol Morris, Rosamond Purcell and Bill Morrison at the New York Institute for the Humanities.  "The Origins of the Confidence Game",for the conference of Police Against Confidence Crime;  "Chirosophi: Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Conjuring Literature," at the Henry E. Huntington Library in San Marino, California;  "Fast and Loose: The Techniques and Literature of Cheating" at the William Andrew Clark Memorial Library, UCLA;  "The Mystery of Fasting Impostors," and "The Avant Garde Art of Armless Calligraphers" at Amherst College;  "Sense, Perception, & Nonsense" at the University of Rhode Island Festival of the Arts;  and the keynote address at the International Design Conference in Aspen on "Illusion as Truth." He has spoken on "Prose & Cons: The Early Literature of Cheating" in the Pforzheimer Lecture Series on the book arts at the New York Public Library and at the Chicago Humanities Festival, and on "Magic & Science" for the T.E.D. Conference (Technology, Entertainment, & Design) in Monterey, California.  Mr. Jay is a founder of the biennial Conference on Magic History and is the former curator of the Mulholland Library of Conjuring and the Allied Arts. He is the author and co-designer of The Magic Magic Book, an illustrated history of the earliest trick conjuring books, published in the Writers and Artists Series of the Whitney Museum of American Art. His book Jay's Journal of Anomalies, based on his fine press periodical of the same name, was recently named one of the "Notable Books of the Year" by the New York Times and one of the "Best Books of the Year" by the Los Angeles Times. His most recent book, with photographs by Rosamond Purcell, is Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck.  Mr. Jay's consulting firm Deceptive Practices has provided expertise on projects as diverse as the film Forrest Gump and the Broadway production of Angels in America: Perestroika. He was a consultant on the Devices of Wonder exhibition at the J. Paul Getty Museum, and was the guest curator for an exhibition on conjuring at the Harvard Theatre Collection.  He has written and hosted his own television specials for CBS, HBO, and the BBC, and was the host and narrator of the first documentary mini- series on conjuring, "The Story of Magic," for the A&E network. He presented of a series of films on con games for Turner Classic Movies and in March of 2003 he debuted as a weekly essayist on the National Public Radio station, KCRW, in Los Angeles.

Matthias Buchinger

You will not be surprised to know that among my books I have a copy of Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women: A History of Unique, Eccentric & Amazing Entertainers by Ricky Jay. I was surprised, however, when that title showed up in the very sophisticated publication,The New Yorker. Let’s just admit that the title is a trifle tacky (which is why I own the book), and the name of the author does not have the look of a name that one might associate with a more serious topic, say the scholarship of Sanskrit.

Our subject for today is one of those profiled in Learned Pigs.. and he is also the subject of two recent essays in The New Yorker because he was on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: “Wordplay: Matthias Buchinger’s Drawings from the Collection of Ricky Jay”. At this time, a good description of what was included in the exhibition still remains on the museum site.

A description of Buchinger is also found there and you will quickly be able to find others, but I will provide one which will indicate why he was called “The Little Man of Nuremberg” as well as “The Greatest German Living” (c 1700):

"This extraordinary person was a german, & little more that the trunk of a man, a body with only a Head and upper Arms, having an excrescence at one Elbow, bearing some resemblance to a Thumb; the lower part of his body was cased in strong Leather, & he twisted himself about the Floor with considerable agility, raising one side a little & turning on the other as a Pivot."

In short, he was only 29” tall. As for “the greatest” part, you will soon see that this man without appendages had many talents.

The skills he possessed as a magician, conjurer and sleight-of-hand artist are undoubtedly those that first attracted Ricky Jay, whose name was perhaps too lightly dismissed. He (Jay) is described in The New Yorker articles as a “superlative card magician” and a “ sui-generis conjurer, scholar, storyteller, actor, antiquarian collector and incorrigible perfectionist…” Mr. Jay offers many descriptions of Buchinger’s performances which reveal that he could juggle and more:

“He performed on a Bavarian folk instrument called the hackebret, the dulcimer, trumpet, bagpipe, guitar, oboe, drum, kettledrum, flute, and strange flute (thought to be the German transverse flute) - which he tried to combine mechanically with the violin as a separate instrument. He shaved himself, threaded a needle, ground corn into flour, and carved figures in wood. Paris witnessed the “Little Man cut paper in severall curious shapes, forms and figures...load and discharge a pistol and never did fail of hitting the mark, he darted a sword at a mark at great distance.”

Such skills, particularly when performed by someone “born without Hands and Feet” are clearly incredible, but they are not the focus of the exhibition,“Wordplay…”

Buchinger could paint and draw and write. He was also a gifted calligrapher and even a “micro-calligrapher”. If one looks closely at his paintings one finds examples of his minute writing buried in the curls of the wigs worn by his subjects. Apparently you need a magnifying glass to see the Ten Commandments done in minute writing even though he did not use one to produce them. Exactly how he did some of these things still remains a mystery, although the facts that he did them are not disputed.

But wait, there is more. On p.56 of Learned Pigs… Jay notes that Buchinger’s name appears in one of the “strangest terms ever recorded in a slang dictionary.” It is found  in Spear’s Slang and Euphemism and in Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue and it is “Buckinger’s Boot” (in England he was known as Matthew Buckinger). Apparently linguists and etymologists puzzled over this phrase. You will never figure it out.

It is unsurprising that I do also possess a copy of  Grose’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue (the 1811 ed. Published by Digest Books in 1971). Here is the entry for “Buckinger’s Boot”.

“The monosyllable. Matthew Buckinger was born without hands and legs; notwithstanding which he drew coats of arms very neatly, and could write the Lord’s Prayer within the compass of a shilling; he was married to a tall handsome woman, and traversed the country, shewing himself for money.”

Still puzzled? Here is the entry for “monosyllable” in the same book:
“Monosyllable. A woman’s commodity.”

We are getting closer. The definition in Grose of “commodity”.

“Commodity. A woman’s commodity; the private parts of a modest woman, and the public parts of a prostitute.”

According to Jay, Buchinger had four wives and around 14 children so it was clear that he did have one appendage after all, and that it worked well. If you still can’t figure it out, see p. 56 in Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women...