The editors have lavishly illustrated this brand-new, oversized edition. The ultimate showman and master of the humbug, Phineas Taylor Barnum has collected in this volume a clown car stuffed with delightful anecdotes, yarns, and tales about the greatest humbugs and hoaxes ever perpetrated. Here you will meet impostors, charlatans, and deceptors - all pulling off a scam of one sort or another. Sometimes they're driven by greed, other times by the sport of pulling it off. This book offers a parade of history's con men and conjurers, religious nuts and swindlers, complete with Barnum's insightful commentary."