Give ’em the Old Razzle Dazzle: A Cover Reveal and Q&A with Nicholas Day for Get Rich Quick

Like many of my generation, my brain consists of 15% useful information and 85% Simpsons quotes. And right now I have the voice of Homer Simpson in my head saying, “Marge, this isn’t one of my get rich quick schemes. This’ll get us rich! And quick!”

I am thinking of this because I have the infinite pleasure and privilege today of premiering the cover of the latest work of nonfiction by Nicholas Day. Indeed, the man who brought us the best beloved The Mona Lisa Vanishes about the absolute weirdness of the Mona Lisa heist, has returned to us with an even stranger story. One concerning a certain Mr. Charles Ponzi.

Get Rich Quick: A Legendary Swindle, a Crooked Age and the Art of the Confidence Game is everything you require in teaching older child readers about slicksters, tricksters, con men, and more. Slated to release January 5, 2027, here’s how its publisher describes it:

From the award-winning creators of The Mona Lisa Vanishes comes a fast-paced and fascinating illustrated nonfiction narrative about a con man who took in a trusting populace and pulled off the greatest get-rich-quick scheme of all time.

This is not a story about money, not really. It’s a story about confidence.

In the summer of 1920, thousands of people crowded the narrow streets of Boston, desperate to hand their money to the financial genius of the age. Charles Ponzi was charming and dapper, the hero of the common people, the enemy of the elite, the only man you could trust. 

But who was he, really? A wizard—a man who could make your cash multiply almost overnight? Or the perfect mirror for an America determined to believe its own get-rich-quick dreams—a land of fake gold and phony schemes?

Welcome to the confidence game, a game only one person can win.  

In this riveting, edge-of-your-seat illustrated narrative, the Sibert Medal–winning creators of The Mona Lisa Vanishes tell the true story of the spectacular rise and fall of a world-famous con artist—and show us the world that he made: a world of golden promises, in which a lie repeated long enough has a halo of truth.

Today, we’re going to talk with Nicholas Day himself about the creation of this book. After that, and ONLY after that, shall we take a gander at its glorious cover (with art by Brett Helquist).

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Betsy Bird: Nicholas! Good god, man! If it’s not stolen masterpieces from the Louvre then it’s Ponzi schemes with you! You appear to be cornering the children’s nonfiction book market on those fellows inclined to stray just a hair outside the law. But before I delve any deeper into your larger predilections, let’s talk about where this little beauty came from. What inspired you to look into Charles Ponzi specifically? What makes him such an ideal subject for a book like GET RICH QUICK?

Nicholas Day: Hi, Betsy! It’s a pleasure to be back here. A few years ago, I found myself reading stories about the confidence game in America. Cons! Frauds! Good old-fashioned hornswoggling! It’s a rich vein. We’re knee-deep in these stories in this country. You can find them in early America. You can find them in the America of a century ago, when Charles Ponzi was at work. And you can find them—well, now.

A good con makes for a good story. There are few better stories. But I found myself coming back to the genre not just because it is entertaining – and it is tremendously entertaining – but because I became interested in the question of trust: when we decide to hand over our confidence, so to speak. A good con isn’t a trick, or it isn’t just a trick. It’s about deciding to trust someone else—the victims think that the confidence man is worth trusting.

It’s a problem for all of us. Because we can’t do anything without that quality—everything in our society only works because we decide to have confidence in someone else.

What I liked about Charles Ponzi is that you can see all this playing out in miniature: it all happened very fast (in only a few months), it was all preposterous (the promised return was impossible), and it all took place in public (everyone could see what was happening). And yet he still almost pulled it off, Betsy. People wanted to believe. People wanted someone to have confidence in. And Charles Ponzi—this charming, never-at-a-loss, up-from-nothing man—was perfect for the role.

So we’ve got the higher-level questions here, which make it interesting to think about—but what clinched it is that it is just such a great story.

BB: And you just alluded to this, but I can’t be the only person who’s been pondering the American fascination with “the swindler”. Hucksters aren’t uniquely American, but the power we give to them seems to have such a significantly American spin, wouldn’t you say? Candy Fleming, for example, has written long nonfiction titles on Buffalo Bill, P.T. Barnum, and (in a wholly different, but not unrelated way) Jim Jones. All America. All appealing to large masses of people. You must have given this some thought. Why does America, specifically, seem to produce folks like Ponzi? 

Nicholas: It absolutely does. It’s not that there aren’t hucksters outside of America. (I talk about a few in Get Rich Quick.) But America has long had a particular genius for the con, or maybe a particular affinity for the con. I’d wager there are more than a few reasons why. There’s the American drive to get ahead, to have more than those around you. There’s the way in which anyone, no matter how modest, might be the person who gets ahead—that with a lucky break, you might be the next millionaire, and maybe that lucky break is when you find a guy’s wallet on the lunch counter, and after you look inside to see whose wallet it is you see a letter from the President of the United States, and you think whoa, and then the guy comes back to get his wallet and you strike up a conversation, because he’s the real deal, if he’s a friend of the President, and that conversation turns into a friendship, and it is only much later when he suggests that someone clever like you might be interested in investing in…

Well, you get the picture.

BB: Beautiful. On a related note, why do you think it’s valuable to teach kids about Ponzi and his ilk? What’s the gain in learning about a shyster or two when you’re young? 

Nicholas: The literature of the confidence game has this tension. There’s the thrill of reading about a good con—very clever people behaving in very bad ways. You often end up rooting for the con artist, even though you know you shouldn’t. It’s intoxicating. But then there’s some throat-clearing. Surely you are only reading this for your own edification! Surely you are only reading this because you want to make sure that you do not get conned! You are not enjoying it. Of course not! You are just being responsible!

I’m always hesitant to use the word valuable. It feels a little like saying that something’s nutritious. It’s not a good way to whet the appetite. But the story of Charles Ponzi does raise a lot of questions that are highly relevant. They’re unavoidable, really. These are questions about who we decide to believe in, and what’s real and what’s not, and how we tell the difference. They speak to our moment. 

BB: Talk to us a bit about how you decided to lay out the book. You have before you a man’s life, and with it comes a series of choices. You could be completely linear about it, or you could be creative. You, I think that it is fair to say, have been creative to a certain extent. But did you always have a clear sense of how you’d lay out the narrative of Ponzi’s life or did you have to do a bit of trial and error first? 

Nicholas: I had too much material, so I wandered around for a while getting lost in all the possibilities. There are always other books that you almost wrote on the way to the book that you did write. I’d originally thought I’d spend even more time away from Charles Ponzi, but I realized that I needed to focus on him more tightly—in part so that I could spend more time away from him. We need to be caught up in his story before we can think about the confidence game more generally. It’s always a balancing act.

BB: You also appear to have spent an inordinate amount of time (and fun) coming up with the titles for each of these chapters. “A Somewhat Unpleasant Place to Find Yourself and We Apologize in Advance for the Smell.” “How to Make Bad Decisions with the Bones of Hoofed Mammals.” And, my personal favorite, “The Aliens Fail to Show Up.” But I don’t have a clear sense of how much freedom (read: leeway) you have as an author to make titles such as these. Did you have carte blanche to write them any way you chose, or did some of these get amended and edited along the path to publication? 

Nicholas: They get improved, of course. (Everything gets improved.) But they’re there from the start. I love writing these titles—as you can tell. A few might seem purely ridiculous, but I think even those do something that’s important. Sometimes it might be as simple as making a joke for no reason at all. (And then the joke’s a springboard into the chapter.) Sometimes they give the reader something to look out for—when they’re reading the chapter, they might think, Ah, that’s what he’s referring to in the title, or that’s what he’s quoting, or that’s the joke he’s making. It gives the reader a feeling of participating in the story.

It’s that last feeling that’s most important. Our hypothetical reader here is reading about Charles Ponzi, and about the confidence game in American life, but they did not start reading because they were already interested in Charles Ponzi. (They had no idea who Charles Ponzi was, let’s face it.) They started reading because they wanted to read a story. And I want to keep that feeling—that impulse—at the front at all times. It’s natural in nonfiction to put more information in. (You’ve done all this research, you know so much, and now there’s so much you have to leave out. I feel like half my job is not writing.) But I always want to preserve the feeling of just listening to a story.  

BB: Utterly agree. Now I am both delighted and intrigued by the fact that your books are often paired alongside the art of Brett Helquist. Helquist initially was the spooky guy who’d get paired with Lemony Snicket titles and the occasional Scary Story to Tell in the Dark. With your books, he appears to be doing something entirely different, though. What, would you say, he brings to titles like GET RICH QUICK and THE MONA LISA VANISHES specifically? 

Nicholas: I could talk for a long time about Brett’s work. It’s perfect for the era of both books here. He gives readers the sense that they’re entering an alternate world, with peculiar characters, strange coincidences, unexpected twists. Almost everyone in the Helquist universe feels at an odd angle, and so everyone is much more interesting than they’d be in a photo. An old photograph can have a static quality, like the story’s already told. But in Brett’s illustrations, the story feels like it is still unfolding. It’s dynamic.

BB: Finally, I can’t help but ask what else you’re working on these days? In 2026 alone you’ve picture books about Darwin and eels and who knows what else. What can we hope to see from you in the future? 

Nicholas: There are picture books with Laura Carlin and Corey Tabor (again, wonderfully) in the works. There’s a longer book about Vermeer, the Nazis, and the greatest, strangest art forgery of the last century. And I am excited about all of it.

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Well… shoot. Now I want a forgery book TOO! I feel like Veruca Salt. I want it now!

To tide us over until then, how about a cover of this book? And yes. It does contain a boater:

I cannot thank Nicholas enough for having such a good discussion with me today. Thanks too to Annie Kelley and the good folks at Random House Studio for treating us to this reveal. Get Rich Quick: A Legendary Swindle, a Crooked Age and the Art of the Confidence Game is on shelves January 5, 2027, so be sure to get your pre-orders in now. Can’t wait? I’m with you. It’s going to be a delight.

Filed under: Best Books, Best Books of 2027, Cover Reveal, Interviews