Saturday, December 26, 2015

Bunkum Entertainments

Robert Ganthony - Bunkum Entertainments (1895)

Google Books link (to download click "settings" symbol in upper right)
Hathi Trust link

A collection of performances and skits from a famous-at-the-time promoter and writer.  (His other books are on ventriloquism and there's an autobiography Random Recollections.)  Topics include thought reading, juggling, hypnotism, a "funnygraph" and performing fleas.  It's pretty much all faked - the juggling is done with wires though honestly it almost sounds easier to just learn to juggle.  There's a poem in supposedly comic pseudo-French and a retelling of Hamlet where the prince becomes a grocer.