Excerpt from The Mannequin Makers by Craig Cliff, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The curtain began to rise and the theatre fell silent. At first only the wooden crates at the foot of the stage were visible, then a revolving platform — he tried in vain to see how it might be powered — and inch by inch a man wearing only a leopard skin loincloth was revealed against a purple backdrop.

Though Kemp had seen — had scrutinized — the plaster statue in the window of Hercus & Barling, he had still expected the real Sandow to be more imposing. What spun slowly before the people of Marumaru was a fair-headed, clean-limbed man of medium height somewhere in his mid-thirties. The orchestra began to play a swift, upbeat tune. Sandow's clear skin glowed pink under the stage lights. The pose he held — his hands clasped behind his head, his feet at right angles with one heel lifted slightly, his torso in the contrapposto of classical sculpture — showed the development and balance of his muscles, the perfect symmetry of his form. Most striking to Kemp was the man's back. It was as if it had been moulded by the hands of a loving god, each muscle distinct and purposeful. It was a tactile thing, begging to be touched. Beautiful in a way that was beyond man or woman, beyond art or life, even beyond the figures that emerged from The Carpenter's gouges.

After two or three slow revolutions of the pedestal, Sandow lowered his arms, making fists of his hands, dropped his head almost until his chin touched his chest and rearranged his pose, making new abdominal muscles prominent that had previously lain flat. It was as if serpents were pulsing beneath the man's skin and he had managed to charm them into performing in unison. Despite the stillness of each pose, he seemed on the edge of being burst open should the charm wear off.

Sandow began to alter his poses more quickly, working up to the pace of the orchestra's accompaniment and giving Kemp less than half a turn to absorb each new perfection before it was erased by another.

In the grief, confusion and anger of the last two days, Colton Kemp had shrunk from the world's many stimulations, had sought and failed to drown his sadness and release his tension, had doubted the existence of happiness elsewhere and in the future, had seen himself confronted with a greyer life untouched by beauty — and yet here he was, in a theatre crowded with almost everyone he knew, excited and overstimulated by this vision of a man, spinning and spinning like a celestial body.

The pedestal came to a stop. Sandow performed a backward somersault from standing, folded his arms and stood perfectly still, his face in profile. The crowd, who had been applauding and exclaiming for the duration of the brief exhibition, responded with a hero's ovation.

'Thank you,' he said and stepped down from the pedestal. 'Thank you. Please, that is quite enough applause.' His voice was deep and guttural.

'I wish to briefly talk to you about how I have attained my strength, the system I am sure many of you are familiar with, before I perform some demonstrations.' He gestured to the props on the stage. 'I was not a healthy child. My parents were not endowed with extraordinary strength. All the strength I possess I owe to my system.'

The boy, Jesse, who had been Father Time, returned to the stage stripped to the waist like Sandow, though he wore a thick leather belt and white tights rather than the master's Herculean loincloth. With Jesse as his model, Sandow — part preacher of the gospel of physical culture, part salesman for his own wares — proceeded to demonstrate how to perform exercises with his Spring-Grip Dumb-bell and his elastic 'developer'. A lot of attention was paid to the development of the lungs and chest — though he pronounced it schest, in perhaps the clearest signal of his origins — and at one point demonstrated how he could expand his chest from an already impressive forty-seven inches to a full sixty-one.

From The Mannequin Makersby Craig Cliff (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2017). Copyright © 2013 by Craig Cliff. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. milkweed.org