Dice: Deception, Fate, & Rotten Luck - Hardcover

"Jay's writing is exactly what one would expect from the extremely erudite, witty and decent author of Learned Pigs & Fireproof Women and Jay's Journal of Anomalies. There is an explanation of the etymology of "craps, " and there are various tales of armless dicers, ingenious hustlers, and Scandinavian kings of the Middle Ages who diced for islands. Dice turn out to be rich subjects for Purcell's photography. She presents them as, in a way, monumental ruins on a Stonehenge-type of scale relative to the book. Their forms are enriched by their disintegration and are bathed in light that their varying translucence seems to contain for a moment before releasing it to the lens ... The book itself is, like a die, a modest object, small for a book of photography and, with a short text, casually organized."

Plato said God invented dice. This we learn from one of Ricky Jay's fascinating essays in a delightful small volume that takes us from the earliest forms (astragalithe heel bones of hoofed quadrupeds, four of whose six sides were used for gaming) to the myriad types of "loading" and other means of cheating with dice in the modern era. Along the way we discover that Augustus, Caligula, and Nero were all inveterate players, that Queen Elizabeth issued a search and seizure order against the manufacture of false dice in 1598, and that dice made from celluloid, invented in 1869, remained stable for decades, and thenin a flashbegan to decompose. These are the dice of Rosamond Purcell's luminous and seductive photographs, images which transform entropy to an art form. Jay and Purcell give us a dual meditation on dice that will educate us and amuse us at the same time. 13 color photographs.