Ricky Jay Knows (SCOWAH Chronicles, no. 3)

Ricky Jay knows eccentric characters: he is also one of our favorite characters.

We discovered Ricky Jay in the pages of Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995) and we haven’t been the same since. He is a scholar of the unusual. His remarkable observations on the activities and popular entertainments of offbeat characters has fascinated and amused his readers, by now a very large following. His books are illuminating for their insight, and for his admiration of  his subjects and the manners of their times. His lively histories run the gamut, with a colorful assortment of hoaxsters, frauds, imposters, sideshow showmen and women, armless calligraphers, mechanical marvels, singing mice, gamesters, conjurers, and jokesters.

Ricky Jay is known as the world’s greatest sleight of hand artist; he is also an actor, having appeared in numerous David Mamet films. He has performed off-Broadway, in the Obie Award-winning one-man show Ricky Jay and His 52 Assistants. A historian in the fields of deception, unusual entertainment, and conjuring, Ricky Jay is the former curator of the Mulholland Library of Conjuring and the Allied Arts (read Mark Singer’s essay, “Secrets of the Magus,” The New Yorker, April 5, 1993).  He is the author of the wildly popular Cards as Weapons (1977) and Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women  (1987). He has written and published sixteen issues of the even more learned and delightful Jay’s Journal of Anomalies (1994-2000),  pursued by collectors and libraries and now gathered into a complete anthology. Extraordinary Exhibitions (2005) is an “informal history of sensational, scientific, silly and startling attractions based on 17th, 18th and 19th century broadsides” from his collection. Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck (2003) is a collection of essays on the history of gambling, with photographs of his crumbling collection by Rosamond Purcell. And in a curious bit of serendipity Celebrations of Curious Characters (2011) has just been published by McSweeney's Books.

Ricky Jay will appear in conversation with Roy Eisenhardt  at the Herbst Theatre, City Arts & Lectures, on Wednesday, May 25.


SCOWAH Chronicles is a series of profiles featuring some of our favorite characters, based on the exhibition The Objects of Our Affection: Wonderful Characters from the Schmulowitz Collection of Wit & Humor. Every year on April Fool's Day the San Francisco Public Library presents a themed exhibition celebrating this extraordinary collection. On view now in the Skylight Gallery, Sixth Floor, through May 31.