[SIDESHOW]

Biographical Sketch of Serpentina, the Serpent Lady

n.d., but ca. 1920s.

5.5 x 8 inches, [4] pp, with a photographic illustration on each page. Faint folding creases, 1/4-inch chip out at the foot of the spine, else very good.

A souvenir pitch book for Serpentina, "the Eighth Wonder of the World, the Despair of Doctors, the Puzzle of Scientists," whose career on the vaudeville and carnival circuit spanned several decades, beginning around 1920 in Oakland, California. According to Mark Hartzman's "American Sideshow: An Encyclopedia of History's Most Wondrous and Curiously Strange Performers," by the 1930s Serpentina was appearing with the Travelling Mammoth Marine Hippodrome Show, and in the 1940s at Coney Island (where "a baby carriage was used to move her about, and her exercise was limited to having someone reposition her limbs," per Hartzman, who adds, "her snakelike flexibility was demonstrated by tying her limbs in knots"). When she wasn't being turned into a pretzel, Serpentina was presented as the "sensational siren of the seven seas," a living mermaid, or "Sea Tiny," with scales on her "boneless" legs. Her actual condition, identified in this biographical sketch as "arrested ossification" (due, the pamphlet tells us, to "lack of developing power of the mother, probably due to over work before the child was born") was most likely some form of osteogenesis imperfecta, a disease in which a lack of collagen in the connective tissues leads to severely weakened bones. The pamphlet in hand appears to have been reproduced at various points in her career, the only variation being in the age assigned to her. Here we are told she is 22 years old; there is at least one other version in which her age is given as 38, and likely others were issued as well. However, OCLC lists only one institutional holding, at McGill, with a publication date of 1938. Ours would appear to be an earlier version, from some time in the 1920s.