By Kimberly Chun

HOARD TOUR: Conjurers, freaks, and unique specimens are
commemorated in the handbills collected by Ricky Jay.

"I love the idea of a pig doing card tricks," Jay says, surveying "Extraordinary Exhibitions: Broadsides from the Collection of Ricky Jay," on display at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts through April 3. He should – he named his initial book, 1986's Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women, after those brainy beasts. "The first piece in the Extraordinary Exhibitions book is a learned horse doing a card trick in 1618. Pretty weird to assume that I've spent my entire life trying to regain the prowess of a horse in 1618 or a pig in 1785!"

"The pig also claimed to read women's minds. I must say I find much of this stuff flat-out funny!" he continues, perking up despite his weariness after a late night following a City Arts and Lectures appearance and ticking off the titles of his favorite show bills. " 'The wonderful remains of an enormous head!' 'The gigantic Hungarian schoolboy!' "

Singing mice, sapient porkers, and horses with exquisite manners – they all make it into Jay's collection of playbills from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, as do mermaids, armless calligraphers, stone eaters, living skeletons, early robots, conjoined twins, magicians, contortionists, and natural phenomena like the "Hottentot Venus." It's an extraordinary collection of paper ephemera that might ordinarily have been glanced at before being instantly discarded and left to rot, making that less-than-magical transformation from pulp to mulch. But somehow Jay – in his travels as a sleight-of-hand artist, following in the footsteps of an amateur magician grandfather and opening for rock artists like Ike and Tina Turner, Leon Redbone, and the Chambers Brothers – took to these "ratty" broadsides as he has warmed to journeymen freaks, geeks, and carnival creeps, and began to collect the handbills about 25 years ago, searching libraries, bookshops, print dealers' holdings, and auction lots.

Curated by Renny Pritikin, the exhibit follows last year's cameo by another Jay collection – of his decaying dice. But these letterpress handbills – small, humble, at times illustrated with woodcuts or decorated with lacy borders or intricate crests and almost always focused on the written word or the hype – are probably closest to Jay's heart.

"I think, of all the things I do collect, maybe these are the ones that are maybe the most integral to what I'm interested in," the mystery man says, looking, in black leather, every bit the street-savvy hustler leery of grift, and sounding like the historian of conjurers, deceivers, and anomalies (or freaks) that he is. "I just like the idea that they're the black sheep of the collecting family, that nobody paid much attention to them. Sometimes they're scraps of paper four inches or five inches long that were somehow saved for three or four hundred years. And I think the other reason I'm so attached to them is often they're literally the only records of the performers they speak about, and clearly my passion is the people who are described. I love unusual entertainers, and I write about them all the time, and the idea of having this living record ..."

Occasionally there's no information on the long-ago performers apart from the handbill on exhibit. One, for instance, depicts Mr. Williams, a completely unknown conjurer from Barbados who performed in London in about 1750 – Jay hasn't found a mention of him anywhere, despite the bill's handsome and crude woodcut, which depicts the magician sending cards sailing through the air, over fruit, fowl, and mice. "Just the fact that the playbill was illustrated at that point makes it very special," Jay explains. "You'd think that he must have had some reasonable following to have an illustrated bill. So you start speculating back from that, and you hope the next day you'll find a reference to him. I still spend a lot of time researching this stuff." Jay may have ceased the publication of his periodical, Jay's Journal of Anomalies, and left his job as the curator of the Mulholland Library of Conjuring and the Allied Arts, but he continues to lecture on the history of unusual entertainments and talk about the subject on KCRW-FM in Los Angeles.

Strolling among the playbills, he confesses that it was hard to edit down his collection to 100 pieces, and he points out the hard-to-find broadside hawking the arrival of the first elephant in America in 1797, a rare playbill for renowned early-18th-century magician Isaac Fawkes, and a circa-1620 piece that beautifully depicts armless dulcimer player Pietro Stadelmann plucking his instrument with tiny feet. And then there's Jay's hero – and e-mail namesake – Mathew Buchinger, the armless, legless calligrapher, magician, trick bowler, and, according to the 1726 bill, "greatest German living."

The 29-inch-tall Buchinger would write on vellum by revolving his flipperlike appendages, Jay explains before reading an excerpt of the poem on the bill: " 'The tricks he plays at cups and balls / 'Tis wrong in any man, who calls / Them slight of hand, as he gives out, / Their slight of stumps, and are no doubt ...' I'm sure that's the worst thing about his life, that he had to suffer these terrible poems."

His commingling of the streetwise and the erudite took Jay from Magic Castle stages to consulting work and appearances in David Mamet films including House of Games, Homicide, and Heist, as well as movies such as Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Tomorrow Never Dies. Mamet also directed Jay's Obie Award-winning one-man show, Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants, and the more recent Ricky Jay: On the Stem.

The actor's latest feats involve pulling off further character roles – in Gus Van Sant's latest film, Last Days, which he describes as being loosely about Kurt Cobain, and in HBO's wild, wicked West series, Deadwood. But he isn't hedging his bets on anything: "Deadwood is a volatile town. I don't know if you'll ever see me again."

Jay realizes all too well that even an experienced scam artist is capable of succumbing to a fresh con. "Since deception is my major profession, I have a fairly fine antenna," he says. "But that doesn't mean I'm not capable of being fooled. I've certainly bought pieces that were represented as real and turned out to be reproductions."

And he is, naturally, wise enough to understand the perils of collecting. "I like the idea that somehow the collection is related to work and it's also a way of sharing," he explains. "There's something that makes me feel pretty funny about 'I own this thing,' because I think there are many, many dreadful aspects of collecting. It's incredibly antisocial behavior, if you think about it. To possess. And buy. And to own. And keep. And hoard. It's the only form of sanctified greed, really." 'Extraordinary Exhibitions: Broadsides from the Collection of Ricky Jay' runs through Sun/3. Wed. and Sun., noon-5 p.m.; Thurs.-Sat., noon-8 p.m., Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission, S.F. $3-$6. (415) 978-ARTS, www.ybca.org.