Arthur Quisto

A. Quisto ventriloquist figure, Dan Willinger's own collection. From Ventriloquist Central.

Turn a Quisto head stick around and hold it up to a mirror. That's the only way you'll ever read the name he carved into it. Arthur Quisto signed his work backward, hidden inside the one piece of a ventriloquist figure nobody is ever meant to see: the wooden dowel buried down in the neck, doing nothing but holding the head up. Dan Willinger found it on the figure in his own collection and said he'd never seen the trick done on anybody else's work. I don't know why Quisto did it. Nobody does, not for certain. But it tells you something about the man before you learn a single other fact: he built to be used, not admired, and he wasn't holding out for credit while he was alive to collect it. Pull up a chair. Here's what the record actually holds on Arthur Quisto.

From Edwin Simms to Arthur Quisto

He was born Edwin Simms in 1882. By the time the ventriloquist trade press got around to writing him up, everybody knew him as Arthur Quisto instead, and Quisto is the name that stuck.^[1][4][5] He worked the English Punch and Judy circuit as a performer in his own right for most of a working life that ran from around the turn of the century into at least the 1930s. Building talking figures was the other half of the job, and he didn't keep the craft to himself. Two of the biggest names in British music hall ventriloquism, Tom Coram and Arthur Prince, both had figures made in Quisto's shop.^[1][4][5]

The English recipe

Open up a genuine Quisto figure and you find the same recipe every time. The head is papier mache, and so is the body, and so are the lower legs. Wood shows up only in two places: the hands, and the bottom board.^[2][3] The mouth hinges in leather. The eyes move side to side on glass. What hair survives is crepe, tacked to a bald papier mache scalp.^[2][3] The levers inside are bent metal wire, about as plain a control as this era of the craft ever produced, and the head stick doesn't lock into a fitted collar the way a lot of American figures do. It just drops into a hole cut to hold it, snug enough to work a whole career on a stage or a Punch and Judy pitch.^[2][3]

American shops of the same era were doing close to the opposite: wood-framed bodies, wood dough for the molded parts, paper only as an afterthought.^[2] Quisto's shop molded the whole figure out of paper and saved the wood for the two spots a hand actually touches. That's an English figure maker's answer to a problem American shops solved a different way, and it held up. Willinger's own history of the trade credits him with one more thing: the first figure maker on record to animate a figure with an electromagnet, after an English maker named Frank Millis had already worked out pneumatic bladders back in the 1890s.^[1] Quisto is the name the record gives for who went electric first. Nobody's produced the wiring diagram to prove it, but nobody's produced a rival either.

The face

Papier mache, side-moving glass eyes, and whatever crepe hair the years left behind.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central

The hands

Carved wood, original paint. The only wood in the whole figure besides the bottom board.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central

The name in the mirror

Here's the detail that makes a Quisto worth a second look no matter what shape it's in. Flip the figure over, find the head stick, hold it up to a mirror. That's the only way the signature reads.^[3] When Willinger later sold part of his collection at auction in 2015, the catalog entry for that same lot repeated his own line almost word for word: the head stick "signed, but interestingly enough you must hold it in a mirror to be able to read the name."^[6][8] The auction's own photographs of that lot, six frames in all, never once show the head stick pulled free of the body for a clean look at the writing itself.^[7] Willinger's own site, photographed years earlier, was more generous. One shot holds the stick right up to the lens, and that photograph is the one on this page.^[3]

A second object altogether carries the same habit. A Quisto publicity automaton, built for a shop window rather than a stage, turned up signed twice more: once inside the body panel, once in the wooden base.^[1] That automaton had belonged to Jack Donovan, an English collector who ran a shop on London's Portobello Road and, before that, is thought to have owned a hotel on the south coast, possibly at Teignmouth.^[1] It crossed a German auction block around November 2010 after decades in Donovan's own hands.^[1] Whatever Quisto's reason for hiding his name where almost nobody would think to look, collectors treat it now as the clearest test they have for telling his work from anyone else's, name or no name.

The circle

No maker builds in a vacuum. Here's who Quisto's work connects to.

Reports of his death, greatly exaggerated

In November 1953, The Oracle, the newsletter of the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists, ran the news that Arthur Quisto had died. Then, in the very same issue, it ran a correction. Maurice Hurling cabled the magazine to say there was no truth in it: Quisto was, in Hurling's own words, very much alive and in good health, and Hurling had himself been invited to go see him.^[9] Whatever happened that fall, somebody was premature with the bad news, and somebody else set the record straight before the ink was dry. By the corpus's own dates, Quisto had another seven years left after that. I just like knowing the man got to read his own correction.

A name collectors keep watching for

Willinger kept an all original Quisto figure in his own collection for years, the same one whose head stick started this whole story.^[3] Vent Haven Museum's own figure catalog lists a piece it calls "most likely a Quisto figure, early twentieth century," credited on the museum's own record as "Quisto / Bill Nelson."^[10] WorthPoint's marketplace archive has turned up more than one figure sold under his name, including the same lot that crossed the Crown Company auction block in Seabrook, New Hampshire, on September 27, 2015, and sold for a thousand dollars against an estimate of fifteen hundred to two thousand.^[11][12][6] A different listing altogether, a nineteen-thirties dummy with no other paperwork, carries his name in WorthPoint's own archive too.^[11]

The market for his work never really stopped. A British dealer listed a figure named Sammy, thirty eight inches tall with a papier mache head and five working mechanisms, and called the piece "pleasingly original": tweed suit, leather shoes, and all, the same ones it left the shop in.^[13] A cased example from around 1932, complete with its own iron bound travel trunk, turned up for sale with a full head rotation that decades hadn't touched.^[14] At a Tetsworth saleroom in 2020, an unstamped figure that simply looked like his work sold for fifteen hundred pounds against a sixty to eighty pound estimate. The trade paper covering the sale called him, in their own words, the revered maker.^[15] And a 1925 figure dressed as a sailor, bought new from Davenports magic shop in London before the decade was out, crossed a Bonhams saleroom in 2012 for five hundred pounds, glass eyes and kid leather chin intact.^[16] Ninety years on, this Punch and Judy man's side work keeps finding its way into new hands. That's not bad for somebody who never bothered to sign his name where anybody could read it right side up.

He built for a Punch and Judy booth and a music hall stage both, in a trade that asks a man to disappear behind somebody else's voice every single night he works. Maybe that's exactly why he signed the way he did. Proof for himself. Not applause for anybody else.

He hid his name backward in the neck dowel, the one spot nobody looks. Meanwhile I've got splinters in places from being turned upside down and shook for laughs, and nobody's signed those.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy