With some of his collection on auction, remembering the amazing Ricky Jay and the magic he made

Even in death, Ricky Jay continues to amaze.

The actor, author, scholar and fabled magician who died in 2018 was a popular visitor on local stages and an energetic collector of all things strange, marvelous and magical. On Feb. 25, some of his collected treasures will go up for auction, 369 lots from A (Acrobatics, Equilibrists, and Jugglers poster, American, circa 1880) to Z (The Zeenas, A Mouthful of Laughs, Paris, circa 1900. Vibrant two-sheet poster).

Our town’s Potter & Potter Auctions is conducting the auction in person, online and by telephone. Gabe Fajuri, the co-founder and president of that company, calls this auction “an intersection of the rare, the bizarre and the beautiful.” It is the first of three Ricky Jay auctions planned by Potter & Potter, the next one scheduled for October.

In a long-ago interview with The New Yorker magazine, Jay told writer Mark Singer, “After this life I’ve lived, I have no idea what is strange and weird and what isn’t. I don’t know who else waxes poetic about the virtues of skeleton men, fasting impostors, and cannonball catchers. And, to be honest, I don’t really care. I just think they’re wonderful.”

Special previews of many items will take place in the days before the bidding begins. Judy Mamet and her son Bob plan to attend one of these gatherings. They are the mother and brother of playwright David Mamet, Chicago’s own and a great friend of Jay’s.

“He would come over sometimes when he and David were in Chicago,” said Judy. “He was different but I liked him so much.”

So did David, writing of him in the New York Times in the wake of his death, “He was the truest friend.”

Mamet first saw Jay in a 1982 performance of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for Shakespeare in the Park in New York and they finally met in 1985, introduced over dinner by a mutual friend. A friendship was born and a working relationship as well. Mamet asked Jay to lecture before an acting class, then cast him in such movies as “House of Games,” “Things Change” and “Homicide.” When Jay got the urge to return to the stage, he turned to Mamet, who directed him in “Ricky Jay and his 52 Assistants,” a popular production at Steppenwolf Theatre in 1995 and earlier off-Broadway, about which Mamet said, “in a 100-seat theater, in a drawing-room set, with a deck of cards, and, for two hours, reduced the wise and blasé of the metropolis to a state of astonishment. No one who saw the show has ever forgotten it.”

He also directed Jay in 2009′s solo show, “A Rogue’s Gallery” at the Royal George Theatre. This was, wrote theater critic Chris Jones, an ardent fan of magic, “an autobiographical performance, offering the full arc of Jay’s career, but with a beautiful suite of mostly card tricks woven into the fabric of what he was doing.”

It is history that dominated Jay’s collecting and helped with the creation of his many books, among them “Cards as Weapons,” “Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck,” and the glorious “Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women.”

The home he shared with his wife, Emmy Award-winning producer Chrisann Verges, was packed with some 10,000 items. It was described by a fellow magician thusly: “Ricky and Chrisann have a beautiful house in the Hollywood Hills. Every wall of every room is lined with bookshelves, posters, prints, and broadsides. The bedroom I stay in on visits is no exception. The shelf nearest the bed has a hundred or so books and pamphlets, on topics ranging from Cockney rhyming slang to second-story men to mind-reading dogs.”

Many items in Jay’s collection have been donated to academic institutions and given to close friends. And this is not the first public auction of his possessions. In October 2021 Sotheby’s in New York featured 633 lots and over two days achieved $3.8 million in sales, exceeding its $3.2 million high estimate, with 94% of its lots sold.

Fajuri purchased a few items from that auction but was busy at the time putting together a Potter & Potter auction of magician and collector Ken Klosterman. But his connection with magic goes far beyond the merely commercial. You can hear the excitement in his voice as he explains, “I became interested in magic and began collecting as a child and have never stopped.”

He grew up outside Detroit, his youthful passion fueled by the books on magic that his attorney father Sami would bring home to him.

In his teenage years, Fajuri traveled, driven by his dad, to magic conventions and while in college at the University of Michigan sold magic-related items on eBay.

He came to Chicago, worked in journalism for a time, and connected with Chicago magician and collector Jay Marshall. They had first met when he was 13 and visited Magic Inc., Marshall’s astonishing Lincoln Square shop. Fajuri also remembers first meeting Jay at later conventions and also being “amazed” watching his Steppenwolf performance.

“I was just 15, maybe 14 and that show just jet-fueled my interest in magic,” he says. “After I moved to Chicago I started spending a lot of time with Jay (Marshall), going to the shop just about every weekend. I asked to go upstairs, not knowing that he never allowed people up there. I was awed.”

The two men became close, often traveling to conventions together. Following Marshall’s death in 2005, Fajuri was selected to be the appraiser of his multimillion-dollar collection. It would become in 2007 the first auction of the then newly formed Potter & Potter, founded by Fajuri and his father, the name being the English translation of their Jordanian last name.

Since then the company has become internationally known for specializing in all things magic, as well as associated things such as coin-operated games and rare toys.

The catalog for its Ricky Jay auction runs to more than 140 color-splashed pages and contains an entertaining introduction by mathematician and former professional magician Persi Diaconis, who writes, in part, “I’m happy that Ricky Jay’s amazing collection will be scattered back to the world of magicians and collectors. Ricky said that I started him off on serious collecting. We knew each other as kid magicians in New York City.”

Jay had a wide circle of friends and admirers. Steve Martin was one of them and once called Jay, “The swindler who never swindled, the conman who never conned, the cheat who never cheated, and mostly, the eccentric collector of all that is eccentric.”

Another fan was Chicago’s own movie and TV star Joe Mantegna. He recalls first meeting Jay at a Mamet birthday party, where he performed sleight of hand magic. “Little did any of us know at the time that Ricky would then become a permanent fixture in the Mamet universe that I so gratefully am a member of,” he told me. “I remember the glee on David’s face when Ricky not only did close-up magic that astounded us all, but also accompanied this with the kind of patter that only a master linguist like David could fully appreciate. It’s no wonder David had him as a valued acting member of the numerous films we all did together.”

It seems appropriate now to leave the last words here to Mamet, who told me, “Joe Mantegna and I always considered Ricky an honorary Chicagoan, which, among us, there is no higher praise. Chicago politicians have always aped and indeed improved upon the machinations of the Land of Sherwood Forest: over here, they robbed from the rich, and from the poor.

“Ricky’s interests bridged the two worlds of criminality and magic — both using a practical understanding of human nature to bring home the bacon. This collection, piecemeal, is delicious; in total it is a sweet glimpse into the mind of its collector, who, though born in New Jersey, was, at heart, a dese, dem, dose guy.”

“The Ricky Jay Collection” auction at 10 a.m. Feb. 25 at Potter & Potter Auctions, 5001 W. Belmont Ave.; 773-472-1442 and www.potterauctions.com

rkogan@chicagotribune.com