The Best Of SHOCKED AND AMAZED! – On & Off the Midway
by James Taylor
Available directly from the author
$25 (plus shipping, signed paperback)
$35 (plus shipping, signed hardback)

Our first pick in today’s 2018 PopCult Gift Guide is a collection of articles from a legendary journal devoted to sideshow entertainment, The Sideshow Collectors Edition of The Best of Shocked And Amazed!–On & Off The Midway. It’s perfect for fans of sideshow entertainment, who to be honest, don’t have too many gifts targeted toward them.

Over 15 years ago, The Best of SHOCKED AND AMAZED! burst onto the show biz scene as the fitting capstone to a decade of our publishing the world’s only journal devoted to sideshow in all its manifestations and all other “weirdness as entertainment.” And now, it’s time for the author to top even that.

Newly published is the Sideshow Collectors Edition of James Taylor’s SHOCKED AND AMAZED! – On & Off the Midway. In the Collectors Edition you’ll get all of the original Best of S&A! in a new, re-designed format – and with over 100 pages of new content!

James Taylor (seen below) has been called “the world’s foremost authority on sideshow.” His Shocked and Amazed! On & Off the Midway was the world’s only journal on contemporary and historical sideshow, novelty & variety exhibition and “weirdness as entertainment.” He has been covering “the other entertainment” for over two decades and has been featured in all major broadcast and print media worldwide for his work in that field from the Baltimore Sun to the New York Times. He is also the co-founder of Baltimore’s American Dime Museum and Washington, DC’s, Palace of Wonders and Red Palace. And, as the sideshow spirit moves him, he writes for the Huffington Post and has been a frequent broadcast columnist for Ripley’s Radio.

James Taylor’s Sideshow Collectors Edition of Shocked and Amazed! showcases the very best of the old-time business – collected from nine volumes of the journal – a journal that’s become iconic in the realm of the strange, the bizarre, the weird, the odd and the unusual. From the last (and sometimes only) interviews with the likes of Percilla the Monkey Girl and Jeanie Tomaini, the last of the Half Girls, to essays on famous women in sideshows and the Man With Three Eyes, it’s all the world’s weird… in one book. You want to know the true origins of the entertainment madness that is the show biz nowadays? It’s all here, in James Taylor’s SHOCKED AND AMAZED! On & Off the Midway – Sideshow Collectors Edition. Without it, oh, you’re just not “with it.”

You’ll find articles and interviews with and about conjoined twins, bearded ladies, pickled baby empressarios, monkey girls and aligator men and other denizens of the unusual novelty acts midway.

All copies are signed – if you’d like your copy personalized or a special message for the recipient of your gift,  that will be done at no added charge. Just check out the website.

The Best Of SHOCKED AND AMAZED! – On & Off the Midway would make a great gift for the fan of eccentric and offbeat carnival entertainment, or for fans of the “Freakshow” season of American Horror Story.