Dice: Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck [Hardcover]

Ricky Jay (Author), Rosamond Wolff Purcell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 2002

This celebration and meditation on dice through the ages includes an explanation of the etymology of "craps" and various tales of armless dicers and ingenious hustlers. It also features the tale of Scandinavian kings of the Middle Ages who diced for islands.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Ricky Jay knows his dice. A sleight-of-hand-performer who is appearing on Broadway in On the Stem, a one-man show directed by David Mamet (in whose movies Jay has appeared frequently), Jay here presents a light, digressive history of dice, from "astragali" (or "heel bones," as mentioned in an Indian epic poem) to how they are loaded for cheating. Dipping into everything from Viking allegory to the 1820 writings of the Rev. Charles Caleb Colton (an eventual ruined gambler and suicide), Jay's anecdotes are colorful but meandering: a description of a 1501 Florentine gambler named Antonio Rinaldeschi eases into a recollection of the outcry at the Brooklyn Museum over Chris Ofili's dung-festooned Holy Virgin Mary. Chapters such as "Dice and Death" and "The Palengenesis of Craps" are complemented by Rosamond Wolff Purcell's 13 color photographs of beautifully decayed dice (when dice age, they can be chipped and crusted, appearing to be made of salt or ice). These portraits of chance's end reveal visually what Jay tells us verbally: dice are as inherently complex and frail as people.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Jay's writing is exactly what one would expect from the extremely erudite, witty and decent author of Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women and Jay's Journal of Anomalies. There is an explanation of the etymology of "craps, " and there are various tales of armless dicers, ingenious hustlers, and Scandinavian kings of the Middle Ages who diced for islands. Dice turn out to be rich subjects for Purcell's photography. She presents them as, in a way, monumental ruins on a Stonehenge-type of scale relative to the book. Their forms are enriched by their disintegration and are bathed in light that their varying translucence seems to contain for a moment before releasing it to the lens ... The book itself is, like a die, a modest object, small for a book of photography and, with a short text, casually organized."

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 64 pages
• Publisher: Quantuck Lane Press; 1st edition (December 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0971454817
• ISBN-13: 978-0971454811
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 7.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #373,183 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A pleasant appetizer, May 12, 2003

By 

James J. Lippard "skeptic" (Phoenix, AZ USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dice: Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck (Hardcover)

This is a thin hardbound volume, a collection of photographs and short
discourses about various aspects of dice, gambling, and fraud. Each
chapter is very short (just a few pages) and the entire book can be
read in less than thirty minutes. Both the photographs and the text
are fascinating, and left this reader wanting more. I hope that Mr.
Jay will be writing more books to share his voluminous and interesting
knowledge of magic, gaming, and cons with the world. (Jay's other
books: Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women and Jay's
Journal of Anomalies are also highly recommended.)

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Dying Dice, February 5, 2003

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Dice: Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck (Hardcover)

Though they may have passed the peak of their fad, fuzzy dice can still be seen hanging from the rear view mirrors of favored cars. They are an amusing bit of American folk surrealism, recalling the more official artworks of the fur-lined cup and saucer or the lobster telephone. The furry dice don't clack the way real dice do, and they are too huge and too rotund ever to be useful as mechanisms in games of chance. Yet they look strange enough that many people fancy them, and assembly lines somewhere are tuned up to produce them for enthusiasts. Conversely, there are real dice depicted in _Dice: Deception, Fate, & Rotten Luck_ (Quantuck Lane Press) by Ricky Jay, with photographs by Rosamond Purcell. But some of them are startlingly furry, and all of them are dying.

Ricky Jay is a magician, and a historian of magic, in addition to being a stage and movie actor. He has produced a couple of large books having to do with the history of magic and showmanship, but this is a small book, square like a face of a die, as are the color close-ups of the afflicted dice. "In the attempt to acquire empirical knowledge, I have accumulated thousands of dice over a period of decades," Jay explains. They are of all sorts of colors and patterns, but most of them are made of celluloid, the same celluloid whose decay has robbed us of countless early movies. Rosamond Purcell specializes in photographing the entropy that overcomes inanimate objects, like a book eaten by termites or rusting objects from the junkyard. Most of the large photographs here show the dice larger than life. The styles of their degeneration are diverse. The transparent ones show cracks through their mass, as if they have been dropped from a height. Some of the faces have crystallized, so that they look as if they have been sugared. Greenish mold seems to grow on some of them, while others seem to be bubbling from inside. Some of them have become as floppy as Dali's pocket watches, while others cleave crisply, leaving cubic fracture lines. Sometimes the spots are preserved, and sometimes it is the spots that have been attacked by time. They are certainly more interesting and more photogenic than they would have been when they were first manufactured.

It is to be expected that the text, in twelve small chapters numbered by pips on the dice, reflects Jay's wit and erudition. Here you can learn a lot of dice history, tales of loaded dice found in Pompeii, or of the conjuring dwarf who had no arms or legs, but manipulated dice in subtle ways. You can read about how God has struck down sacrilegious gamesters. Here is the legend of the Scandinavian kings throwing dice for territory, each throwing repeated boxcars until a surprising stroke (consistent with these pictures) gives a throw that beats a twelve. These are all good stories of the importance which many have felt for dice and their outcomes, and they are made poignant by the handsome photographs of just how chance and time have overtaken these humble cubes.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another curious masterpiece from Ricky Jay, November 22, 2002

By 

Joe Niedbala (Watertown, MA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Dice: Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck (Hardcover)

Ricky Jay, that connoisseur of all things shady, arcane, and marvelously odd, brings us yet another trip into the history of man's less than (ahem) socially respectable obsessions. With "Dice", he, in his ever unique style, tantalizes us with tales of one of the oldest gambling accessories known to man. And like the great magician and (very respectable) confidence artist that he is, he does it with smooth patter here, a bit of flashy historical anecdote there, while still never quite giving you all there is to know. Of course he keeps something hidden and to himself. It's in his blood and it makes you finish this slim volume wanting more, but in a good way. You'll go through this book in one sitting, but won't hesitate to reach back for it again and again -- or perhaps, to pick up a pair of dice and see what all this fuss over the centuries has been all about. Face it, pal, you've been sucked in, and you're in good (and bad) company.

Rosamund Wolff Purcell's beautiful color photographs of Jay's dice collection punctuate the text with amazing views and perspectives of the small and very much decaying bits of man's folly. They appear as ancient ruins, crumbling away with time, much in the manner of many a gentleman's fortune once he has found himself enticed by these small, six -sided devils. Marvelous art.

Both Jay and Purcell have rolled a natural with this one!