Quite coincidentally, three slim and tasteful tomes have made their way to my mailbox (the real one, not the virtual) within the space of a week, so I thought it made sense to bundle them together into a single post. The one thing they have in common is that they should all be of interest to classic show biz lovers!
Rafael Sabatini is best known today for the many movies that have been adapted from his novels, including Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk, and Scaramouche. Early in his career, however he ventured into pulpier precincts. The two “hypnotic tales” included in this volume, The Avenger (1909) and The Dream (1912) are detective stories in which the culprits use the mesmeric arts as a murder weapon. Editor Donald K. Hartman (whom we’ve profiled previously in the context of his book about medicine show huckster Nevada Ned) supplements the stories with an informative introduction, and a little backgrounder on George Du Maurier’s Trilby, which informs the tales. The book is the third volume in a series of works on Victorian and Edwardian Era Fiction, published by Themes and Settings in Fiction Press. Get it here.
While the cover of Erik Åberg’s Cleverer Than God suggests The White Album, I can assure you that, inside, this book is an exquisite aesthetic object. It is a contemplation of the life and art of vaudeville’s greatest juggler Paul Cinquevalli. Marketing materials say that it “tells the story” of Cinquevalli’s life, a slight exaggeration given how few genuine facts are known. Even if they were, though, I wouldn’t alter this book for the world. It’s a thing of beauty, minimalist, yet full of quotes by the artist and his admirers about all his miracles and missteps. There are also some nice photos and woodcuts. Streamlined though it is, it did help me improve my own post on the performer, which had to have been one of my worst biographical articles ever. I highly recommend Cleverer Than God as a gift book; it’s something to be enjoyed as a literary work as much as it is a spotlight on a very narrow area of show business. In that spirit, I can recommend all of Modern Vaudeville Press’s books. Their catalog is here.
Speaking of narrowly focused show biz books. I’d love to have been a fly on the wall when Professor Francis Shor pitched Soupy Sales and the Detroit Experience to Cambridge Scholars Publishing. The thing of it is, it does fill a niche in the scholarly record. Soupy Sales’ early work in local television is mostly lost to time. Recordings don’t exist. Schor actually undertook a research project in the approved scholarly fashion to recapture that ephemeral information as best he could via interviews and questionnaires conducted throughout the Detroit area. And (to some of us at least) Sales was a significant historical personality. It was a project worth doing, though few would prioritize it. Schor, whose previous book is Weaponized Whiteness: The Constructions and Deconstructions of White Identity Politics (2020) confesses that he undertook the project during the dark days of the lockdown to lighten his mood. Even so, it’s not a trivial work. Among other things, he places the Soupman in the context of his time and place. Mid-century Detroit was, like most of America, a pretty racist place, even if the Motor City was soon to give us Motown. Soupy, with his love and advocacy of jazz, is presented as a kind of beacon during those times, pies in the face notwithstanding. Get that one here.