Next Tuesday the annual DC Elephant Walk comes to town, bringing with it the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. This week we celebrate the mighty pachyderm with F. F. Hagen’s “Baby Elephant March.” For another example of the dimunitive animal’s terpsichorean versatility, see Pierre Latour’s “Baby Elephant Waltz,” which also hails from the Historic Sheet Music, 1800-1922 collection in the Performing Arts Encyclopedia.
Last year In the Muse wrote about P.T. Barnum, the entrepreneur whose name still appears on the marquee of The Greatest Show on Earth, on the occasion of his two hundredth birthday. The other name on the marquee is also well represented in Library collections – search for “Ringling” in the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog to find photographs and posters related to the circus pioneer and his empire. Among the search results is an intriguing description of photos (unfortunately not digitized) from the Look Collection made at the wonderful Ringling Museum of Art in 1948 by a photographer who would soon become a celebrated showman of his own: Stanley Kubrick.