Persi Diaconis is the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Statistics and Professor of Mathematics as Stanford University and co-author of Magical Mathematics: The Mathematical Ideas That Animate Great Magic Tricks .  He proclaims, “Scholars of magic, deception, and the allied arts - rejoice: Ricky Jay's research files, manuscripts and correspondence are safe and will be available at the Lilly Library. Ricky was THE major scholar of his subjects and built bulging files with untold treasures. Come one come all, it's all at the Lilly.” 

Born Richard Jay Potash in Brooklyn in 1946, Jay was introduced to magic early in life by his grandfather Max Katz, a certified public accountant and amateur magician.   As “Tricky Ricky,” the young Jay performed magic for his grandfather’s friends as early as age four and made his first television appearance at age seven. Katz also introduced his grandson to a way of learning that would become central to his life: the study of a craft under a master practitioner.

 Although Jay was a brilliant researcher and collector of books and the printed word, he understood that some things are so special that they cannot—must not—be written down. They can only be passed on from a master to an apprentice or, in some cases, never passed down at all. Jay spoke throughout his career about the importance of secrecy in the magic community, and the motto for his consulting firm Deceptive Practices was “Arcane Knowledge on a Need to Know Basis.” 

Jay left home at a young age and his early adventures included attending Cornell University, working as a carnival barker, appearances on talk shows such as Dinah Shore and The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and a performance at New York’s Electric Circus in which his act was sandwiched between a lecture by Timothy Leary on LSD and a performance by Ike and Tina Turner. He found his way to two master practitioners who shaped his life and career, Dai Vernon and Charlie Miller, both of whom lived in Los Angeles, where Jay eventually relocated. 

Ricky Jay, author 
In the 60s and 70s he also began to develop his own brand of performance, including his use of “cards as weapons,” a concept which became his first published book in 1977. Cards as Weapons was followed by about a dozen more books over the course of his life, including Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women (1986), which introduced readers to such curious characters as “Blind Tom” Wiggins, an enslaved boy who became a piano prodigy in 19th-century America, Arthur Lloyd, the “human card index” who could produce any sort of card from his pockets because he carried over fifteen thousand of them, and “Le Pétomane,” the French flatulist who could play “O Sole Mio” or blow out a candle with his farts; The Magic Magic Book (1994), a study of Livres Magique, special books produced to create an illusion; Jay’s Journal of Anomalies (2001), which collected issues of a letterpress periodical Jay published on curious characters both celebrated and ignominious; and Matthias Buchinger: "The Greatest German Living" (2016), about a 74-cm-tall man born in 1674 without arms or legs who was a magician, musician, engraver, calligrapher and practitioner of micrography (tiny writing), and expert bowler.

The Lilly Library also acquired Jay’s remarkable collection of historical spirit photography, one of the most significant such collections ever assembled. The Jay mss., 1864-2005, consist of 325 spirit photographs and related materials collected by magician Ricky Jay.

Spirit photography was the deceptive art of photographing ghosts.  The first spirit photographs were created in 1861 by Boston jewelry engraver and amateur photographer William Mumler. He took advantage of newly developed glass-plate negative processes that made it possible to reuse an exposure plate, allowing prior images to remain visible. Mumler was able to create photographs of living people with the “ghost” of a loved one appearing faintly in the picture with them. 

Rising interest in Spiritualism, grief over the loss of lives during the American Civil War, and the relative novelty of photography itself made the practice of photographing ghosts especially appealing throughout the rest of the 19th century and into the early 20th. Eventually, skeptics like Harry Houdini and psychical researcher Harry Price exposed this practice as fraud, and the practice dwindled. 

Jay’s collection includes 325 images in the form of albumen prints, cartes de visite, cabinet cards, and post cards, many from the earliest known spirit photographers of America, England, France, and Russia such as Mumler, Alexander Aksakov, Édouard Buguet, Richard Boursnell, Frederick Hudson, John Beattie, and Charles Lacey. Some were featured in the exhibition "‘Twixt Two Worlds, or The Uninvited Guest: A Magician at the Séance," compiled from Ricky Jay’s Sad Museum of Specimens of Misdirected Ingenuity at the Christine Burgin Gallery in New York in 2005. Highlights include Mumler’s portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln with the spirit of Abraham Lincoln behind her, a photo of “Brown Lady of Raynham Hall,” one of the most famous hauntings in England, and photographs of Eusapia Palladino, one of the most successful spirit mediums of all time, conducting seances. 

The collection also contains correspondence discussing spirit photography and spiritualism in general, Lacey’s two pocket diaries documenting his “experiments” with the medium R. Rita, and printed materials such as playbills, programs, and clippings for mentalist and anti-Spiritualist Washington Irving Bishop and magician and paranormal investigator John Nevil Maskelyne. The collection of spirit photographs has been processed by Lilly Assistant Archivist Kyra Triebold and is open for research. A finding aid can be accessed online and materials can be viewed in the Reading Room by appointment.