📚 The Circus

The ring and the big top: acrobats, equestrians, bands, and the social history of the traveling show.

Below are the 8 works carrying the subject circus in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	The Circus Fire	Stewart O'Nan	2000	11
	Very Special People	Frederick Drimmer	1973	6
	Le Cirque	Pascal Jacob	1996	5
	American Sideshow	Marc Hartzman	2005	5
	100 years of circus posters	Jack Rennert	1974	3
	Hold that tiger	Mabel Stark	1938	2
	Palhaços	Mário Fernando Bolognesi	2003	2
	The Ringling Brothers	Richard Glendinning	1991	1

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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Want the ideas behind these books explained rather than listed? Try Study for short explainers, Academy for deeper tracks, and the periodic table or the night sky when the book is about matter or stars.