For a more lengthy discussion of Gibbons's life, please see Amelia Klem, "A Life of Her Own Choosing: Anna Gibbons' Fifty Years as a Tattooed Lady," Wisconsin Magazine of History 89, no. 3 (spring 2006): 28-39. The interview by Arthur Lewis can be found in Arthur Lewis, Carnival (1970). Sideshow and circus history is well documented in Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (1988),;A. W. Stencell, Seeing Is Believing: America's Sideshows (2002); and Janet M. Davis, The Circus Age: Culture and Society under the American Big Top (2002). The history of American dime museums is found in Andrea Stulman Dennett, Weird and Wonderful: The Dime Museum in America (1997). Tattoo history can be found in several sources, including Steve Gilbert, Tattoo History: A Source Book (2001), and Jane Caplan, ed., Written on the Body: The Tattoo in European and American History (2000).
American National Biography Online October 2008 Update.