He passed in 2018 - one of the best of the best. His collection is up for sale this October 27th at Sotheby's:
The Ricky Jay Collection
Magician, actor, scholar, author: the range of Ricky Jay’s accomplishments were as varied as are the formats and subjects of the material in his celebrated Collection: books, pamphlets, posters, handbills, broadsides, prints, ephemera, objects, and apparatus documenting the histories of magic, circuses, jugglers and acrobats, automatons, remarkable characters, learned animals, limb-deficient artists, con men, and scores of other related, if arcane, topics. Featuring characters of the greatest celebrity to the utmost obscurity, The Ricky Jay Collection will offer an astonishing variety of material in a sale that is truly without precedent.
Ricky Jay is one of the very select company of persons who assembled a collection of the very first rank in a field in which he was not only a world-renowned practitioner, but also a scholar of considerable note. Jay documented his collection in a series of books that both highly entertaining and thoroughly erudite, including Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women, Jay’s Journal of Anomalies, Extraordinary Exhibitions, and Matthias Buchinger: “The Greatest German Living.” Jay’s source material for these and other publications will now be available for the elucidation and entertainment of other collectors—as well as the legions of Ricky’s admirers—at Sotheby’s auction of The Ricky Jay Collection, October 27 and 28, 2021. We invite you check this page often for updates.
I would want to go there just to watch people. Here is just one small taste of Ricky's work - more can be found on YouTube
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