Illusionists, cardsharps, charlatans and human cannonballs enliven a trove of rare books, posters and ephemera now going to auction at Sotheby’s.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the 17th century water spouter Jean Royer, able to swallow prodigious amounts of water and then spout said liquid in colors and aromas pleasing to the senses.

But what was Jay’s wife, Chrisann Verges, an Emmy Award-winning producer, to do with it all.

Verges said that his collection so occupied Jay’s thoughts that he was giddily unwrapping recent acquisitions during his final hospital stay.

She then invited representatives from Sotheby’s auction house to explore Jay’s accumulated treasure, which occupied nearly every shelf, drawer and display case in their two-story house.

When Selby Kiffer and Ella Hall, specialists in books and manuscripts at Sotheby’s, arrived at the Jay-Verges home, tucked into a hillside off Mulholland Drive, they were taken aback by the size and breadth of the idiosyncratic collection.

A Sotheby’s veteran, Kiffer was more familiar with Thomas Jefferson and Herman Melville than with Toby the Sapient Pig, or Ralph Terry, the silhouette artist known as The Man With the Mysterious Fingers.

“I think he wanted to know whose shoulders he was standing on,” Kiffer said in an interview at Sotheby’s headquarters, on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, where he was preparing for a two-day auction of Jay’s collection beginning Oct.

“He was rightfully judgmental,” his longtime friend Steve Martin said.

“I have a theory,” Martin said.

(He carried packs of cards with him wherever he went, his wife said, and was constantly practicing his shuffling technique, including while at the movies.).

“But for Ricky it was really the space,” Verges said.

It took two truckloads to haul Jay’s collection from the one-bedroom apartment he was vacating.

“And Ricky was so nervous,” Verges said.

After Jay died, Verges realized that what she had inherited wasn’t so much a collection as it was, she said, “a collection of collections.”.

Verges would offer them coffee, and then they would lose themselves once more in the curious Ricky Jay sea.

In the end, Kiffer and Hall selected close to 2,000 items that are to be offered in 634 lots at this month’s auction.

“There will be a lot of interest just because these were Ricky Jay’s books,” Cassidy said!

“From now on, every book in this auction will be ‘The Ricky Jay Copy.’ That’s how it will be referred to.”.

Kiffer said that the Ricky Jay Collection auction will not be the most expensive sale he’s ever been involved in.

After Sotheby’s removed the nearly 2,000 items it had selected — 200 times 10, ladies and gentlemen

Here, then, ladies and gentlemen, was Ricky Jay’s last illusion, as explained by his astonished wife, Chrisann Verges: