Ricky Jay is one of the greatest sleight-of-hand artists in the world, which is to say that he deals in deception, misdirection and the seemingly impossible. His shuffles can leave aces congregating at the top or the bottom of the deck depending on his requirements, and he will even deal from the middle if needed. Once asked, in a New Yorker profile, if there are people who still play cards with him, he replied, “Sure. Silly people”, and plenty of his most honest skills are so astonishing that they still have a touch of artifice to them. For many years, the climax of a performance has seen Jay throwing playing cards with such force that they will penetrate the “thick, pachydermatous outer layer” of a watermelon – a fruit that he often prefixes with the term “his majesty”. It should not be too surprising, then, that having finished Jay’s latest book, a biography of the 18th century magician, musician and calligrapher Matthias Buchinger, I raced online to see if there was any truth in the tale I had just read.
Buchinger delighted his audiences with an act that sounds like an improbable muddle. Alongside close-up magic, the German-born performer would play musical instruments, often of his own invention, and pull off impossible stunts using bowling balls, one of which involved knocking over a pin while leaving the cup of liquid that stood on top of it unspilled. He was also an expert in micrography – the rendering of amazingly small writing. A famous self portrait from 1724 shows Buchinger in a coat and wig, each hair of which is actually a separate line of text. In total, the wig contains seven Psalms and the entirety of the Lord’s Prayer.
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