You Could Look It Up: The Reference Shelf From Ancient Babylon to Wikipedia

by Jack Lynch

  COMPILER: Edmond Hoyle (1672–1769)

  ORGANIZATION: Chap. 1, general rules; chap. 2, particular rules; chap. 3–7, particular games; chap. 8, “A Case to demonstrate the Danger of forcing your Partner”; chap. 9, probabilities of various hands; chap. 10–12, directions for playing specific hands; chap. 13, cautions; chap. 14, playing sequences

  PUBLISHED: London: printed by John Watts for the author, 1742

  PAGES: viii + 86

  TOTAL WORDS: 11,000

  SIZE: 6½″ × 3¾″ (16.5 × 9.4 cm)

  AREA: 15.3 ft2 (1.4 m2)

  WEIGHT: 7 oz. (196 g)

  PRICE: 21s.

  The book was a prompt success, and it encouraged him to tinker with the text. A second edition was called for within a few months, and while the first edition had omitted Hoyle’s name, identifying its author simply as “a gentleman,” this one bore “By EDMUND HOYLE, Gent.” on the title page. The following year, 1743, saw an amazing eight new editions, including a pirated one from Dublin. People clearly wanted Hoyle’s wisdom without his extravagant price tag. Within a few years, pirated editions would outnumber the authorized London printings. Hoyle, aware that he could never compete with the pirated editions if he continued charging a premium, released his second for just two shillings a copy.

  Hoyle soon began branching out into other games. After A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist in 1742 came A Short Treatise on the Game of Back-Gammon in 1743, and two works—A Short Treatise on the Game of Quadrille and A Short Treatise on the Game of Piquet … To Which Are Added, Some Rules and Observations for Playing Well at Chess—in 1744. These guides soon came together in one volume, as with The Accurate Gamester’s Companion: Containing Infallible Rules for Playing the Game of Whist … Also the Laws of the Game … to Which Are Added, the Games of Quadrille, Piquet, Chess and Back-gammon, … Likewise a Dictionary for Whist, and an Artificial Memory, published in 1748, or Mr. Hoyle’s Games of Whist, Quadrille, Piquet, Chess, and Back-Gammon, Complete, in Which Are Contained, the Method of Playing and Betting, at Those Games … Including Also, the Laws of the Several Games, published around 1755.

  The early editions were not much interested in official rules. Hoyle’s Piquet book, for instance, includes a section on chess that nowhere explains how the pieces move. But later editions gave more attention to the rudiments:

  The Chess-Board contains sixty-four Squares.

  The King and his Officers, being eight Pieces, are placed upon the first Line of the Board, the white Corner of it being towards your Right-hand.

  The white King must be upon the fourth black Square. The black King upon the fourth white Square: Opposite to each other.3

  Hoyle aspired to teach players not merely the rules but the strategies behind them, and that meant teaching them some principles of probability and statistics. Both of these branches of mathematics were still in their infancy, and if even the professional mathematicians were largely ignorant of probabilities, laymen were completely in the dark. Hoyle therefore worked to introduce the amazing power of combinations:

  First Quere, How many Chances are there upon six Dice?

  Answer, | on 1 | on 2 | on 3 | on 4 | on 5 | on 6 |

  Chances, | 6 | 36 | 216 | 1296 | 7776 | 46656 |4

  The thought of probability turned his attention to less frivolous topics, like mortality. In a curious digression he prints a “Breslaw Table”—the name comes from such tables’ early use in Breslau, now Wrocław, Poland—giving estimates of the proportion of people who can be expected to live to each age. Of every thousand infants born, 855 were expected to live into their second year, 680 to survive to the age of eight, 531 to be alive at thirty, and just 20 of the original thousand to live to age eighty-four.5 Such a table served more than morbid curiosity: the new insurance industry was keen to know the likelihood of various disasters. “Suppose it was required to know the Odds of a Man of 25 Years of Age, dies within a Year?” Hoyle mused:

  Look in the Table and you will find in the Column against 25, that there is alive 567; in the following Year, viz. 26, there is only 560 living; therefore it is 560 to 7, that a Person of twenty-five Years of Age lives one Year. Or when reduced, 80 to 1.6

  Or, more ghoulish still,

  If you would know how many Years a Man of forty has an equal Chance to live, look in the Table against 40, and you will find alive then 445; then look in the Table till you come to half that Number, viz. 222, which shews that is nearly an equal Wager that a Man of forty Years of Age, lives twenty-two Years.7

  Hoyle’s great achievement was to become not merely one gaming commentator among many, but the quasiofficial arbiter of how games are played. By collecting all the rules in one place, Hoyle turned an instruction book into a reference book. His was no longer a book to be read through before play began: instead, it was a book people turned to when they needed to settle arguments.

  Keeping all the editions, expansions, abridgments, adaptations, and translations straight is a bibliographical nightmare, and not merely in England: Hoyle’s work crossed the English Channel in 1763, when it was published in France as Le Jeu de whist de M. Hoyle. The proliferation of “Hoyles” caused problems—for Hoyle, of course, since he was not earning any money from the unauthorized copies, but also for his readers, since the whole point of having a book to settle disputes is to have a single, unimpeachable authority. Hoyle and his publishers began by putting notices on title pages to indicate the book was “Authoriz’d as revis’d and corrected under his [E. Hoyle’s] own hand.”8 That formula proved insufficient, so beginning in 1743, he began warning them away from the competition: “The author has thought proper to inform the publick, that no copies of these books are genuine, but such as are signed by him.”9 (The books were far too popular for him to sign every copy; the publisher made do with a woodcut of his signature.)

  Hoyle was impressively long-lived: he died in 1769, in his late nineties, beating the odds that appeared in his own tables. And though he published prolifically during his lifetime, his productivity only increased after his death. In 1775, for instance, Charles Jones published Hoyle’s Games Improved, a work of 228 pages that went through multiple editions. In 1860 an American Hoyle appeared, and in 1887 The Standard Hoyle, a Complete Guide upon All Games of Chance. Some editions got smaller: An Epitome of Hoyle, with Beaufort and Jones’s Hoyle Improved; or, Practical Treatises appeared around 1783, the word epitome in the title tipping off potential buyers that this was an abridgment. Even though it spelled out the rules and offered betting advice on thirteen separate games, from backgammon to tennis, it filled just 87 pages.

  Hoyle quickly became a byword. He was famous enough to inspire an anonymous wag to publish The Humours of Whist: A Dramatic Satire in 1743, which took a few digs at Hoyle, such as insisting that “The genuine Books published by the Author, will be all signed with his Name.”10 Other literature of the day reveals Hoyle’s place in high society. In Tom Jones (1748), Henry Fielding sketched a portrait of a young man about town who was scandalized to find four guests playing cards, and “my Hoyle, Sir,—my best Hoyle, which cost me a Guinea, lying open on the Table, with a Quantity of Porter spilt on one of the most material Leaves of the whole Book.”11 In 1750, Samuel Johnson’s Rambler series published a letter supposedly by the airheaded “daughter of a man of great fortune,” who boasted, “Mr. Hoyle, when he had not given me above forty lessons, said I was one of his best scholars.”12

  By 1786, people were using the phrase “according to Hoyle” to mean “in accordance with the rules of games.”13 By the second decade of the nineteenth century, the expression had broadened its application further: it was now “in accordance with the rules,” not only of card games, but of games of the heart. A novel from 1818, for instance, refers to a colonel who has “the stupidity to boast of non-payment” of his debts, “which is not thought exactly, according to Hoyle, in the love game.”14 Another novel describes the “ceremony” of kissing one’s love letters, “which, in love affairs, i
s … according to Hoyle.”15 By the 1830s, a writer could explain that Hoyle’s “name has become so familiar, as to be immortalised in the well-known proverb, ‘According to Hoyle.’ ”16 By the time the short story writer O. Henry used it in 1906—“The financial loss of a dollar sixty-five, all so far fulfilled according to Hoyle”—Hoyle had joined the very small number of reference-book writers whose personal names became synonymous with the authority embodied in their books: in the English-speaking world, only Johnson, Webster, and Roget enjoy a similar name recognition.

  Though the Hoyle franchise eventually published guides to cricket (“The Ball must weigh not less than five Ounces and a Half, nor more than five Ounces and three Quarters”), tennis (“A Tennis Court is usually ninety-six or seven Feet long, by thirty-three or four in Breadth”), and so on,17 most of Hoyle’s attention was on the baize and the game board. But one book devoted entirely to an outdoor game became so successful that it became a brand name to rival Hoyle’s.

  Rheumatism forced John Wisden, a popular Victorian cricketer, to end his sporting career at the age of thirty-seven, and an impressive career it was. Wisden was born in Brighton in 1826 and, though he lacked the height that many players hoped for, he was an impressive underarm bowler. He went on to play not only for Sussex (82 matches, 578 wickets) but also for Kent and Middlesex. In one legendary match, he bowled all ten wickets in the second innings of the South v. North game on July 15, 1850. No one had ever done it before, and in the more than 165 years since, no one has done it again.

  After his unexpected retirement in 1863, he founded John Wisden & Co. in a shop near Leicester Square, and from that location he ran a world empire of sports publishing, turning his attention to a publication that collected facts and figures about the sport he loved. He was not the first; The Guide to Cricketers, edited by a former associate of Wisden’s, had been appearing annually since 1849. And Wisden’s own first edition, published in 112 cramped pages, was undistinguished when it appeared in March 1864. Robert Winder, the historian of Wisden, has called the first edition little more than a “clump of scorecards.”18 Although the preface explained that “we have taken great pains to collect a certain amount of information,” it was apparently cobbled together in a rush. It included only rules (“No umpires shall be allowed to bet”) and scores, but no commentary: “We, of course, make no comments upon the matches, leaving the cricketer to form his own opinion with regard to the merits of the men, since a great many of our readers are at least equal, if not superior, to ourselves in arriving at a right judgement of the play.”19

  The first edition was not even limited to cricket. There are rules of other games—for instance, the rules of quoiting—and even miscellaneous reference information such as the dates of the English Civil War, the lengths of England’s canals, and the dates of the Crusades was included. Gideon Haigh, the chronicler of Wisden’s enterprises, describes this first edition as “a messy book, its scores surrounded with such factual bric-a-brac as winners of the Derby, Oaks at St Leger, a potted history of China, and the rules of pastimes like Knur and Spell,” which “seemed destined for a short life.”20

  And yet, despite the unpromising beginning, its publication has been regarded as an epoch in the sporting world: “1864 should rank as the dawn of cricket,” Haigh argues. “The publication of the first edition of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack was more than the minting of a distinguished imprint; it manifested the emergence of a record-keeping instinct in the game, now taken for granted, but intrinsic to its senses of continuity and context. The idea of records was a precondition for modern sport.”21

  TITLE: The Cricketer’s Almanack, for the Year 1864, Being Bissextile or Leap Year, and the 28th of the Reign of Her Majesty Queen Victoria, Containing the Laws of Cricket, as Revised by the Marylebone Club … Together with the Dates of the University Rowing Matches, the Winners of the Derby, Oaks, and St. Leger; Rules of Bowls, Quoits, and Knur and Spell, and Other Interesting Information

  COMPILER: John Wisden (1826–84)

  PUBLISHED: London: W. H. Crockford, March 1864

  PAGES: 112

  SIZE: 6″ × 3½″ (15.2 × 9.3 cm)

  AREA: 17 ft2 (1.6 m2)

  PRICE: 1s.

  LATEST EDITION: Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack 2014, 151st ed., by Lawrence Booth (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 1,584 pages

  The first edition of the Almanack was followed by a second in the next year, and then a third—it became an institution, and a remarkably consistent one. As Winder notes, “We know next to nothing about the way the early volumes … were assembled.”22 As Wisden’s role declined, the sportswriter W. H. Knight stepped in. The title went through a few permutations: The Cricketer’s Almanack became The Cricketers’ Almanack in 1869, and a year later John Wisden’s Cricketer’s Almanack to give the founder more prominence. Cancer took Wisden’s life in 1884, but it did not affect the success of his publishing franchise. By that time the Almanack was edited by George West, the Times cricket correspondent. And the book kept growing, so that by 1892 it had reached 448 pages. Prospects for continued publication looked grim during the Great War, which threatened to put an end to the great Victorian sporting guide as it had put an end to so many Victorian institutions. But somehow the publishers kept it going, even though the tone of the book grew melancholy. Nearly two thousand cricketers were killed in combat, and the 1915 edition of Wisden featured forty-eight pages of obituaries.23

  Once the war was over, the annual Almanack resumed its growth. It reached 727 pages in 1920; in 1924, it passed a thousand pages for the first time. Big changes came in 1938. The Almanack was acquired by a new publisher, J. Whitaker & Sons, who reorganized the book. Countries were now put in alphabetical order, and births and deaths were moved to the end of the book. Whitaker put money into improving the quality of the photographs. Most important, though, they added women’s cricket to the venerable guide.

  The Blitz in 1940 wiped out the company’s archives, so that much of the early history of the Almanack is now lost, but the franchise continued to thrive, and more than a century and a half after the guide’s premiere, its popularity is undimmed: it remains the world’s longest-running and most widely read reference book on sports. “The Almanack, like cricket itself,” the historian David Kynaston wrote, “represents something deep in the English psyche.” For many it is a passion. “If I knew I was going to die today,” the mathematician G. H. Hardy said, “I think I should still want to hear the cricket scores.” Alec Waugh, the brother of Evelyn, dubbed it “the cricketer’s bible” in the London Mercury, and the language used to describe it verges on the theological. Even Robert Runcie, then Archbishop of Canterbury, addressed the annual Wisden dinner in 1997 with a devotional metaphor: “All faiths need a sacred text. It’s a big help if the faithful come to believe that it is well nigh infallible.”24

  Over the book’s first 150 years, Wisden has taken up 133,000 pages, and they are interesting even to those who care nothing for cricket. John Fowles, Terence Rattigan, Sam Mendes, and King George VI all make cameo appearances, having played games that made it into the book. “Mr S. V. Beckett” appeared in 1925–26, and the notice of his death in 1989 described him as a left-hand opening batsman and left-arm medium-pace bowler and praised his thirty-five runs in four innings. Only in the last sentence does the obituary acknowledge, almost as an afterthought, that he was also “one of the important literary figures of the twentieth century.” As befits a venerable reference book, Wisden has occasionally proven helpful in fields seemingly far from cricket. The British Library spent £27,500 for more than a hundred letters by the late playwright Harold Pinter. They all came from the years 1948 to 1960 but bore no more specific dates. A scholar, noticing references to cricket in nearly all of Pinter’s letters, turned to Wisden to pin down when each was written. Where Pinter wrote of cricketer Doug Padgett, “Didn’t he get a century yesterday, to bear out your words? … And what about Wilson being called back to continue his innings?,” the librarian
s were able to turn to Wisden to discover that it had to be a reference to the Yorkshire–Warwickshire match of July 23, 1955.25

  The Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack is still published annually; it has never missed a year since 1864. Recent editions, published since 2008 by Bloomsbury, run around seventeen hundred pages a year and cover men’s and women’s cricket around the world. The game has changed a great deal since that first edition, and Wisden reflects those changes: the first South African was named Leading Cricketer of the Year in 2007, and the first Bangladeshi and Irish cricketers were in the top five in 2011. Claire Taylor was the first woman to make it into the top five in 2009. But it is still deeply conservative. The Almanack, with its iconic mustard-yellow jacket, has become an institution, and like so many institutions, it is slow to change. The few times the editors mustered up the courage to change direction—as when, in 1987, Graeme Wright decided to remove the old-fashioned laws of cricket from the guide—popular outcry forced them back in. The early volumes sell for thousands of pounds, because “A shelf-full of Wisdens,” wrote sports historian Patrick Kidd, “is a sign of civilisation and a curious mind.”26

  It is only natural that the earliest reference books should be concerned with matters of life and death: promising an eye for an eye, prescribing remedies for diseases, keeping sailors from shipwreck on rocky coasts. But it is a testimony to the reference book’s changing value in the culture that it was eventually adapted to purposes less utilitarian. The bibliography of game- and sport-related reference books is now long, and it includes many beloved titles. Some (like Hoyle’s) teach particular skills to the players; others (like Wisden’s) provide handy information for those on the sidelines; but they are all concerned with maximizing the pleasure that people take in their pastimes.