Step Right Up: Collecting the Spectacle of the Circus

For generations, the circus promised audiences something they couldn’t find anywhere else: spectacle, daring, illusion, and a glimpse into a world that existed just beyond everyday life. On September 3, 2026, Potter & Potter Auctions brings that history back into the spotlight with Step Right Up: Circus and Sideshow Memorabilia. Featuring the collection of lifelong circus collector John Diesso, the sale spans the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with posters, photographs, route books, scrapbooks, costumes, books, and other artifacts documenting the performers and personalities behind “the greatest shows” of their day.

From colorful European lithographs to objects connected to P.T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill, the auction captures both the public spectacle and the more personal stories behind it. Here are five highlights worth a closer look.

Charles Levy, Folies-Bergère / Tous Les Soirs / Les Lions de Bostock, ca. 1880s (Lot 72)
Before television, film, or social media, the poster was one of entertainment’s most powerful tools. This striking color lithograph by Charles Levy offers a wonderful example of how nineteenth-century audiences were enticed through bold imagery and a healthy dose of drama.

Created in Paris around the 1880s, the poster advertises the Lions de Bostock at the Folies-Bergère, depicting a lion tamer in a vivid red coat surrounded by four lions. The composition captures the danger and theatricality that made animal acts such a draw for audiences. Linen backed and measuring 23 by 16 3/8 inches, the poster also bears a French tax stamp, a small detail connecting this colorful piece of advertising to the everyday business of entertainment.

Estimate: $400–$600

P.T. Barnum Signed Document, 1876 (Lot 366)
Few names are as inseparable from the history of American spectacle as P.T. Barnum. This modest sheet of paper provides a surprisingly personal counterpoint to the larger-than-life showman behind it.

Dated January 7, 1876, the document contains Barnum’s ink signature, “Truly yours / P.T. Barnum / Jany. 7 1876,” written beneath a request for his autograph from Ella Le Row of Syracuse. Measuring just under eight inches tall, it retains its original mailing folds along with slight stains and smudges. Rather than a grand piece of promotional material, it is an intimate piece of correspondence, and a tangible connection to one of entertainment history’s most influential figures.

Estimate: $400–$600

The Buffalo Bill Archive (Lot 468)
One of the auction’s most significant offerings is an extensive archive relating to William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. More than a collection of memorabilia, the group brings together objects that illuminate both Cody’s public legend and private life.

Among the contents are Cody’s personal rosewood and brass grooming kit, his meerschaum pipe, rare photographs, including a circa 1850 daguerreotype believed to depict Cody around age four, and a previously unknown circa 1875 portrait. The archive also includes a signed first edition of Cody’s autobiography and a family scrapbook filled with photographs, letters, telegrams, press clippings, and material surrounding his death in 1917.

Together, these objects reveal the person behind the carefully cultivated image of the scout, showman, and Wild West icon. For collectors, that combination of personal provenance and historical significance makes the archive especially compelling.

Estimate: $15,000–$25,000

Sells Bros. Circus Cage Wagon Side (Lot 634)
At 12 feet wide, this carved and painted wooden panel offers circus history on an appropriately grand scale. Dating to circa the 1870s and originally part of a Sells Bros. Circus cage wagon, the panel is painted red and embellished with gilded carvings depicting a jester, eagle, seraph, and a dragon-like winged creature.

The work is attributed to celebrated American woodcarver Samuel Anderson Robb and has an equally fascinating history after its circus days. It was discovered in the rafters of a barn at the Ringling Bros. winter quarters in Baraboo, Wisconsin, in the early 1950s and was later exhibited at several museums. It sits at the intersection of circus memorabilia and American folk art, a surviving fragment of the elaborate visual world that once traveled from town to town.

Estimate: $4,000–$6,000

Mismade Girl Illusion (Lot 647)
The circus world was never only about what audiences could see; it was also about convincing them that they had seen the impossible.

Built by John Gaughan & Associates in Los Angeles in the 1990s, this Mismade Girl Illusion transforms one of stage magic’s classic concepts into a full-scale theatrical apparatus. An assistant enters the stacked yellow cabinet, blades are inserted, and the cabinet sections are rearranged to create the illusion that the performer has been impossibly “mismade.” The boxes are then restored and the assistant emerges unharmed.

Measuring 81 by 34 by 34 inches when assembled, the illusion offers collectors something beyond traditional ephemera: an actual piece of performance history.

Estimate: $2,000–$3,000

The Show Goes On

What makes Step Right Up so engaging is its range. Posters once plastered across city streets sit alongside personal autographs, photographs, carved wagon decorations, books, costumes, and working illusions. Together, they tell the story of an entertainment industry built on anticipation—the promise that once you stepped inside the tent, something extraordinary was about to happen.

Potter & Potter Auctions’ Step Right Up: Circus and Sideshow Memorabilia takes place September 3, 2026, with bidding available through Bidsquare.com. For collectors of circus history, popular culture, folk art, ephemera, and the wonderfully unusual, it is a chance to take home a piece of the spectacle.