The history of instructional juggling books in English is, from my perspective, also the story of the rise of hobbyist juggling since the 1940s. In the 1940s, there wasn’t much of a juggling community in America. Professional jugglers found themselves in the company of magicians at conferences like the International Brotherhood of Magicians (IBM) and reading publications like IBM’s monthly issue of The Linking Ring. What juggling books there were, be it Rupert Ingalese’s Juggling, or How to Become a Juggler (1924) or Will Goldston’s Juggling Secrets (1911), were aimed at performers. Hobbyists, though, are not necessarily interested in sharing their juggling with an audience. So, some of them instead “learned how to juggle from articles written in Popular Mechanics by Charles Career… one of the few sources of juggling information before World War II” (“40th Anniversary”).

In 1944, though, that all changed. After graduating from electrical engineering, a juggler named Roger Montandon started up a little press above the Wait Manufacturing Company plants where he worked. He published a newsletter called the Jugglers’ Bulletin, which “gave voice to a wide scattering of jugglers who had no way previously of sharing their interests” (“40th Anniversary”). Montandon’s Bulletin gave advice to jugglers, hobbyists and professionals alike, and it became the first community to develop around juggling in America. It even helped the American juggling community stay in touch with jugglers from around the world who would write into the Bulletin. It was in the Jugglers’ Bulletin that Montandon started calling for an organization dedicated to jugglers like the ones magicians already had. So, in 1947, at the IBM convention, Montandon, Art Jennings, and six others founded the International Jugglers’ Association ...