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by Ricky Jay, photographs by Rosamond Purcell
(Norton, 64 pages, $12.95)
Ricky Jay's new book on dice works for one primary reason: The author is an astonishing amalgam of scholar and magician. Jay, a renowned sleight-of-hand artist, is passionate about the minutiae of magic and the odd beauty found in both the ordinary and the abnormal, as he's proven in his previous books Jay's Journal of Anomalies and the marvelous Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women.
Jay's latest conjuring is this collection on the history, phenomenology and mythopoetic structure of gambling's classic objet d'art, dice, which Plato believed had been invented by the gods. Rosamond Purcell's gorgeous, almost animate photographs of Jay's personal collection of ancient, dilapidated dice perfectly illustrate his witty analyses of the dotted cubes' origins and meaning. The close-up photos detail the vagaries of fortune these objects, like their users, have experienced. While Jay's crumbling older dice are barely held together or completely split in half, others bear the scars of human tampering against luck (weighted dice).
Given the subject matter, Jay and Purcell might easily have loaded the dice with more ponderous significance than they could bear. Instead, they've created a lively, resonant meditation on chance, decay and elusive hope. Catherine Kernodle
WWeek 2015