Description

Easton Press leather edition of Irving Wallace's "The Fabulous Showman: The Life and Times of P.T. Barnum," a COLLECTOR'S edition, illustrated with Period Photographs, one of the LIBRARY OF FAMOUS EDITIONS series, published in 1990. Bound in brown leather, the book has decorative paper end leaves, acid-free paper, Symth-sewn binding, a satin book marker, gold gilding on top edge only---in near FINE condition. COLLECTOR'S NOTES is included---but has a tear! Phineas Taylor. Barnum, who lived from 1810-1891, was born in Connecticut, one of 10 children his fathered sired with two wives. In 1835, Barnum, then a grocer, took a gamble that thousands of New Yorkers would pay to see a 161-year-old woman, one JOICE HETH, who claimed to be the former nanny of President GEORGE WASHINGTON. His instincts proved right and within days of arriving in New York City Heth became an instant celebrity with her appearances grossing Barnum $1500.00 a week. (When Heth died in 1836, an autopsy reports she was 80 years old, only half her supposed age.) By 1838, Barnum was almost penniless. Then he learned that Scudder's American Museum, on the corner of Broadway and Ann Street, was for sale. Scudder's was precisely the venue Barnum needed with its "relics and rare curiosities. For twenty-five cents, visitors could view "Feejee Mermaid," a preserved oceanic oddity from the South Sea. When Barnum heard about a tiny boy who was only 25 inches tall and weighed only 15 pounds, he found CHARLES STRATTON and he became Barnum's famous "General Tom Thumb," making both millions. Barnum took Tom Thumb to Europe where the midget was extremely popular, amusing kings and nobility. Queen Victoria gave Tom Thumb a magnificent court dress which he wore before all the principal courts of Europe. Later when Barnum heard of a remarkable female midget, MERCY LAVINIA WARREN BUMP, who weighed twenty-nine pounds and was thirty-two inches tall, he sought her for his show. Barnum found her a most intelligent and refined young lady, well educated, and accomplished. When Tom Thumb met Lavinia, he courted her and although her mother disliked Tom for his mustache and pomposity, the couple were married. The public was curious about their "sex life" but they were said to be "sexually normal." Despite the fact that Tom Thumb made several million dollars in his lifetime, he left Lavina with little but his name. However, interest in midgets waned, and Lavinia's life dissolved into a nightmare of one-night stands. She died in 1919. When Tom Thumb died at age 45, over 10,000 fans attended his funeral. Barnum signed the "Swedish Nightingale, JENNY LIND, to a contract for her American tour. Barnum signed Chang and Eng, Chinese Twins, children of an impoverished Chinese fisherman. From birth, they were united by a thick, fleshy ligamnet covered with skin, connecting their lower chests. After being shown on the Continent for many years, Chang and Eng were taken to Boston and New York and advertised as "The Siamese Double Boys," and they became a part of Barnum's freak family. The twins were opposites: "What Chang like to eat, Eng detested. Eng was good natured, Chang cross and irritable. Chang drank; Eng did not." They eventually retired to a plantation in North Carolina. At age forty-two they fell in love with the young daughters, Addie and Sally, of a poor Irish farmer, married in a double wedding, and between the two, they produced twenty-one children! (Although they had two houses, the men would spend three nights at one house and then three nights in the next.) "Barnum's Great Traveling World's Fair," as it was originally called, soon became the most richly mounted circus in America. No expense was spared. Barnum purchased the famous elephant, JUMBO, who ate 200 pounds of food a day along with a quart of whiskey. Barnum married Charity Hallett and they became parents to three daughters. Six years after Barnum's death, the New York World published a sensational exposure of the showman's extramarital sex life including his fathering a son--- who Barnum acknowledge and cared for him in childhood and educated him as a physician. After Charity died, Barnum married Nancy Fish. At his funeral, the Reverend Robert Collyer said: "P.T. Barnum was a born fighter for the weak against the strong, for the oppressed against the oppressor. . .He had always had time to right a wrong and always time to be a good citizen." 279 pages, including an Index. I offer Combined shipping.