Playbills: The playbill's the thing here. Ricky Jay, a sleight-of-hand artist, Hollywood actor, collector of the ephemera of the theatrically outrageous, presents 73 bills, or broadsides, of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries - 47 of them English - and revels in the sensational, scientific, silly and startling attractions on display.
All the showmen's rodomontades are matched by Jay's witty and copious notes on each bill: as one American critic has put it: "Jay's on the erudite side of carnival barkerdom."
It was Maurice Gorham in Showmen and Suckers (1951) who best summed up the genre: "Illusion, mystification, sex, thrills and sheer skill - out of these ingredients the showman compounds his brew. Skill is the basis, but hokum is the seasoning."
Jay gives full account of both, with sapient pigs, strongwomen, singing mice, exquisitely-mannered horses, mermaids, men-monkeys, stone eaters, living skeletons, learned cats, gigantic whales, early robots, magicians, clowns, contortionists, and natural phenomena such as "The Famous African Hermaphrodite".
Take Jacob Hall. "Noted Funambulo and Rope-Dancer", a bill of c.1670 announces his "Rare feats of Activity and Agility . . . as doing of Somersets, and Flip-flaps, Flying over Thirty Rapiers . . . and also through Severall Hoops". Women, among them Lady Castlemaine, found Hall "a due composition of Hercules and Adonis".
There was much skill and little hokum in the acts of Mathew Buchinger, born near Nuremberg in 1674, who gave exhibitions of conjuring, swordplay, bowling and dancing, and playing upon half a dozen instruments - all without hands or legs. He was a master of a wide variety of calligraphic styles, produced by manipulating a pen between his two "flipperlike excrescences" at the ends of his arms. He reached no more than 29 inches in height, married four times, fathered 14 children and died in Ireland in 1739.
There's a conglomeration of conjurors here: one Rubini called his act a "Resplendent Wizardian Cagliostomantheum of Prestidigitation". If audiences were baffled by this verbosity, so too are we now when we look at descriptions of acts such as "Professor" John Anderson, "The Wizard Of The North". An 1851 playbill for his "Night In Wonder-World" has him using "Gorgeously Superb Apparatus", including "The Wand of Rosicrucius; Cabalistical Candles; Anderson's Own Phylophilogicon; Dr Dee's Mirror; Oracle of Psammetichus; The Globes of the Hindoo" and, extraordinarily, "The Lavatory of Necromancy".
But while there was much skill and strength on show, of wizardry and acrobatics and superb horsemanship - including, c.1767, Thomas Johnson "The Irish Tartar" - there are many bills advertising the Phileas Barnum hokum side of the business: outright scams and, worse, the "monstrous freak" shows. The armless, legless Buchinger was an artistic phenomenon in his own right. Many of the later acts were there for the credulous to gawp at.
"Roll up! Roll up!" was a call to excitement in my childhood when the fairground processed into town, but when you'd paid your pennies you were standing in a small, shabby tent, the smell of crushed grass mixed with the smells of sweat and dung, and you were staring at the Fat Lady or the Bearded Lady, who sat stolidly knitting, staring back at you, until you shuffled out feeling bewildered, and cheated, and somehow sick at heart. But only for as long as it took to run to the next booth. "Come and see The Lizard Girl . . ."
Jay has bills for a Stone-eater of 1788 ("Such persons as please may bring STONES with them"); for the Pig-Faced Lady of 1815 ("being neither better nor worse than a shaved bear"); for the Hottentot Venus of 1811 (Thomas Carlyle commented on her "posterial luxuriance"); for the Chinese lady of 1851 ("with small Lotus Feet only two-and-a-half inches in length"); and those famous conjoined twins Chang and Eng, and Millie-Christine, "the superstar attractions of the nineteenth century".
The 25-year-old Barnum's first show was in 1835, promoting Joice Heth, "Nurse to Gen. George Washington, Aged 161 Years!" But she was less than 80, and Barnum's scam was called "one of the most precious humbugs that was ever imposed on a credulous community". A modern commentator has rightly remarked that we might regard the moment of Barnum's exhibition of Joice Heth as "the birth date of modern American popular culture". They celebrate what they should condemn.
But while the claims in the text were often outlandish, the typography and printing of these bills is at all times elegant and sometimes quite beautiful: one three-colour bill of 1867 for the Star Music Hall in Liverpool is a triumph of the printer's art.
The book is essentially the catalogue for a California show of some of Jay's collection: it is itself elegant, meticulously presented, and it reproduces the bills in good size and with sympathetic attention to detail.
Those of us who collect such memorabilia can only gaze open-mouthed at the stories of Jay's thorough scouring for the esoteric. One bill he found for 1824 was for a London performance of Sheridan's Pizarro before King George IV. The bill was thus annotated: "The playbills for their Majesties were, as is usual on royal visits, printed on white satin. The Queen being ignorant of its meaning, very cordially used it to wipe her nose with on several occasions, until it fell over into the pit, where a violent scuffle ensued, as to who should bear away so delicate and precious a relic."
And the eclectic hunters of ephemera among us will read of that silk playbill, and will echo with Jay the eternal cry of the collector: "Where is it now?"
Andy Barclay is a writer and journalist, currently working on a study of Irish songs and singers in music hall and vaudeville
Extraordinary Exhibitions by Ricky Jay. The Quantuck Lane Press, 176pp. $49.95