When the sleight-of-hand magician Ricky Jay died (he might prefer the word “disappeared”) in 2018, he left behind the magical collection he spent a lifetime acquiring, a library of occult arcana unlike any ever assembled. Starting tomorrow, Jay’s trove of “objects spanning the history of magic illusionism, popular entertainment and other curiosities” is being auctioned off at Sotheby’s in New York. Not since Prospero threw his sorcery book into the sea at the end of The Tempest has so much secret knowledge been voluntarily relinquished.
Growing up in 1950s New Jersey, young Richard Jay Potash learned from the masters, absorbing the sophisticated, velvet-gloved approach of Dai Vernon and Cardini as well as the sideshow-carnival-barker tradition of the “Coney Island Fakir,” Al Flosso. Even as a young man, Jay had an appreciative awareness that his mentors were the last of a disappearing kind, magicians who had perfected their unusual entertainments on the vaudeville circuit. But, for Jay, it was not enough to merely go back 50 or so years to find inspiration; by pursuing and collecting antique manuscripts and artifacts, he both revived and preserved a much older and stranger magic.
