"The circus is the only spectacle I know that, while you watch it, gives the quality of a happy dream," wrote Ernest Hemingway. You may recall our enduring fascination with circuses (and not just those of the mediabistro.com variety, where we hope to see you later this month), and so we're particularly excited about Taschen's mammoth, photo- and poster-laden book on the subject. Slated for June publication, The Circus, 1870-1950 is edited by Noel Daniel and written by circus historians Linda Granfield, Dominique Jando, and Fred Dahlinger, Jr. The book includes over 900 color and black-and-white illustrations, including photographs by everyone from Matthew Brady and Walker Evans to Lisette Model and get this, Charles and Ray Eames. In this excerpt, Jando discusses the circus posters that "plastered barn walls, wooden fences, and the sides of city buildings" with images of "roaring lions and tigers, charging rhinos, and furious hippos attacking natives hunting on the river Nile."

These powerful and colorful depictions became an integral part of circus magic, a tempting tease of the wonders that awaited you. The circus was the main user of printed advertising at the time. Larger shows plastered thousands of lithographic posters each day; no other industry ever came close to these numbers. A few printing companies specialized in this very lucrative business....Some designs were elaborate, others relatively simple, some were elegant, many were gaudy, but all were colorful, charged with energy, exalting the mundane, improving the extraordinary, exaggerating the extravagant. Even before you saw the actual show, the circus was already delivering its wonders far and wide with its advertising.