Early in their careers, two friends—the mysterious Austrian-born magician named Joseffy, and the plain-speaking Midwestern poet Carl Sandburg—created an amazing book. It disappeared.
The three-time-Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Carl Sandburg, the popular biographer of Abraham Lincoln, the matter-of-fact poet of the people, once cautioned his readers, “I tell you, the past is a bucket of ashes.” But he typically described himself as an idealist. “I don’t know where I’m going, but I’m on my way.”
Sandburg began his career as a young poet and orator on Lyceum stages, lecturing through towns and small cities across the Midwest. His first published book of prose was a slender pamphlet intended as tribute to a fellow Lyceum performer. It was called Joseffy: An Appreciation. It offered a description of the weird, amazing, inventive conjurer and violinist that was then sharing Lyceum stages with Sandburg.
The book is pure Sandburg—deliberately rough around the edges with bits of contemporary slang. As Sandburg later defined it, “Slang is a language that rolls up its sleeves, spits on its hands and goes to work.” Yet this booklet is also sprinkled with glowing poetic flashes, hinting at the elegance and profundity of the magician’s performance. Today it is a collector’s item in American literature, an incredible rarity. In magician’s literature, the book was quickly overshadowed by another contemporary book, The Marvelous Creations of Joseffy by David P. Abbott, which generated controversy about the magician’s actual accomplishments. Sandburg’s book seemed to disappear.