Abe Bookman

Abe Bookman was born Abe Buchmann in Ohio in 1898, a first-generation American whose parents were Russian Jewish immigrants who reached the United States around 1895; he anglicised the surname to Bookman around 1955. He left the University of Cincinnati to support his mother and siblings when his father died, and took a degree at the Ohio Mechanics Institute in 1921. In 1946 his brother-in-law Max Levinson brought him a fortune-telling tube made by Albert Carter, the son of a Cincinnati clairvoyant; the two formed Alabe Crafts from their first names, and Bookman engineered the thing that worked — a twenty-sided die floating in dark liquid inside a sealed cylinder. He encased it in a crystal ball, then in 1950 Brunswick Billiards commissioned the black eight-ball shell it has worn ever since. It has never gone out of production.