He was a personal hero of mine, but I never met him or even saw him perform. Somehow, it seems like he never came through Austin. (A friend of mine told me a great story about seeing him live: I hope that person will post that story on their own blog.)
I’ve said before that my three favorite magicians are Penn, Teller, and Ricky Jay. But I admired Jay as a magic historian as well.
NYT. The legendary New Yorker profile.
It is the Daileys’ impression—a perception shared by other dealers in rare books and incunabula—that Jay spends a higher proportion of his disposable income on rare books and artifacts than anyone else they know. His friend Janus Cercone has described him as “an incunable romantic.”
“Probably, no matter how much money he had, he would be overextended bibliomaniacally—or should the word be ‘bibliographically’? Anyway, he’d be overextended,” William Dailey has said. “The first time I met him, I recognized him as a complete bibliomaniac. He’s not a complete monomaniac about books on magic, but within that field he is remarkably focussed. His connoisseurship is impeccable, in that he understands the entire context of a book’s emergence. He’s not just interested in the book’s condition. He knows who printed it, and he knows the personal struggle the author went through to get it printed.”
I don’t know what else I can say, except that the world is a smaller, colder, and less interesting place today.