The improbable matter and elegant manner of the writing put me in mind of Borges. I had never heard of Buchinger before the book arrived in the mail. It coincides with the publication of a beautiful book, “Matthias Buchinger: ‘The Greatest German Living,’ ” in which Jay recounts his decades-long hunt for legacies of “the Little Man of Nuremberg.” It’s a delicious read, spiced by anecdotal encounters with the author’s fellow-obsessives in a field as deep as it is narrow. Jay, the superlative card magician and a scholar and collector of antique marvels, lent nearly all the Buchinger material in “Wordplay.” Finely curated by Freyda Spira, the show ranges from a medieval Hebrew Bible-micrography was devised by ninth-century Jews in the Middle East-to alphabetic works by Jasper Johns and other contemporaries. How he did all this-or, really, any of it-not even Ricky Jay knows for sure. He had three wives whom he outlived, one who outlived him, and a total of fourteen children. Courtesy Collection of Ricky Jayīuchinger won popularity, too, by playing musical instruments, building tableaux of objects in bottles, loading and firing guns, doing magic tricks with cups and balls, and bowling-“knocking down pins on which a glass of liquor was balanced without missing a drop,” according to one witness. Buchinger barnstormed fairs, inns, and courts in Germany, France, England, and Ireland in the early eighteenth century, exhibiting his skills as a calligrapher who specialized in micrography: drawing with lines of infinitesimal text, such that a normal-looking head of hair might turn out, on close inspection, to transcribe in swirling cursive a chapter of the Bible.īuchinger’s life has long fascinated the magician Ricky Jay. I refer to the show’s central complement of works by and about Buchinger (1674-1739), a German artist and performer who was born without hands and feet and stood just twenty-nine inches tall. The umbrella term is “wonder,” which applies as both subject and effect to “Wordplay: Matthias Buchinger’s Drawings from the Collection of Ricky Jay,” a historical show of prints, drawings, books, and manuscripts, involving words and letters, by numerous artists and artisans, at the Metropolitan Museum. We thereby put happy faces on mortifications of our common sense. Similarly, we employ “incredible” to confer credibility, and “fantastic” to admit facts.
When we call a thing “unbelievable,” we’re expressing a belief that it’s true.
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