The Life and Times of Augustus Rapp: The Small Town Showman

Brown cloth with gilt stamping on front cover and spine, pictorial dust jacket. Portrait frontispiece, illustrated, 183 pages. Soiling to jacket, else in good condition. Gus Rapp was a magician, mentalist, juggler, ventriloquist, puppeteer and actor -- a roving entertainer in search of an audience. He spent nearly 60 years as a wandering showman in the villages of the Midwest and rural South during the 1890s and early decades of the 20th century. At the grand old age of 89 Rapp began his amusing and curiously readable autobiography about life on the road by writing, "I was born dead." Illustrated with photographs and playbills.