These are two of my favorite books, and I would never have been fortunate enough to read them if I didn't have my little junking problem. (So maybe it's not a problem after all, she says as she stares apprehensively at the dangerously tottering piles all around her.) Each tells the story of a traveling showman: Charles A. Taylor, who practically invented the Snidely Whiplash School of Melodrama, and Dewey "Pigmeat" Markham, a comic who got his start in carnival "gilly" shows and had a major influence on Laugh-In era comedians like Flip Wilson. Different men, similar atmosphere. You get such a great sense of old timey showbiz from these two tales, and an exihilirating sense of freedom and adventure from the sagas of their vagabond lives on the road. Here Come The Judge! smells faintly of its previous owner's catbox, and I've read Blood and Thunder so often the paper is curling off its flimsy spine, but these are two of my most treasured finds, ever.
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