2023: The Year in Collecting

An even dozen books came my way in 2023. I've discussed two of them in the essay "Oddly Imposed. Oddly Signed." I'll write about four more here, ignoring some 19th century books on whist that filled gaps and ignoring some 19th century books in Italian that are on lesser-known card games. 

The earliest is a French work on the game of piquet dated 1683. My experience with French and English gaming literature is that small pamphlets appeared treating a single game appeared first in the 17th century. The booksellers learned that those interested in one game were likely interested in more of them, and anthologies replaced works covering a single game. In France, early works on games such as piquet, reversis, and hoc gave way to anthologies such as La Maison Académique. In London, early works on piquet and hombre gave way to The Compleat Gamester and later, Mr. Hoyle's Games. 

 

Piquet 1683

 It was a treat to find this late 17th century work, of which only one other copy is recorded. An earlier version of the book was published in 1631 and portions were translated into English in 1651 in a book I discuss in the essay "Piquet, Provenance and a Puzzle." Actually, I'm lying a bit. The first 25 pages of this 43 page pamphlet are on piquet, but it has a couple of pages each on another nine card games. Nonetheless, it is a small (12.5 x 8.7 cm) pamphlet and feels more like one of the single-game pamphlets. 

 

Next is a manuscript on the game of trictrac. I've shared other trictrac manuscripts here, here, and here. As noted on the title page, the scribe copied the book while he was staying in the parish of St. Jean de Brayes just outside Orleans in 1787. The printed book is quite rare with three copies known other than mine, one in Lyon, one in Grenoble, and one Châlons-en-Champagne, Marne. All these cities are several hours’ drive from Orleans, so perhaps there remains another copy closer to Orleans. I wonder if our 1787 scribe was aware of the book’s rarity when he spent hours making his copy.

Manuscript

printed book

But the year would not be complete without finding some Hoyle. It gets harder and harder for me to find something new and most of the recent acquisitions have been either cheap books or translations. I've often written about Robert Withy, the author of Hoyle Abridged, or Short Rules for Short Memories at the Game of Whist by "Bob Short". My overview article listed editions known to me in more than ten years ago.

London 1806 Harris

 

 More continue to turn up, including an auction find, pictured at left. It is an 1806 "twenty-second" edition printed in London for John Harris, described more fully here. I have seen an advertisement for a "twentieth" Harris edition of 1801, an 1806 "twenty-first" edition printed in Bath, and an 1809 "twenty-second" edition printed in London. They are all different settings of type. It is hard to make sense of the fanciful edition numbering and the fact that 1806 saw books published in London and in Bath. No other copies of this one are known, so I won't much complain about the indifferent condition.

Firenze 1823

Recently, I have done a lot of work on my online bibliography. I have added photographs of books in my collection and have reworked the section covering Hoyle in translation. See here and scroll down to "Continental Translations." A couple of clicks away is a full description of this 1823 Italian translation of "Bob Short" on whist, one of two recorded copies. It is the first of two Italian translations of "Bob Short," followed by another Florence imprint in 1832. 

 

 Happy holidays and best wishes for 2024!

Oddly Imposed. Oddly signed.

Last month I ended a six-month dry spell, adding two French gaming books to my collection.  Each has bibliographical oddities. 

The first book is L'Arithmétieque du Jeu de Boston published in Cherbourg. Although no author or publication date is given, secondary sources identify the author as Louis-Guillaume-François Vastel and the date as 1815. Boston is a game of the whist family, discussed here and in more detail in Hans Secelle's recent book From Short Whist to Contract Bridge Toronto: Master Point Press (2020). The book is rare, with copies found only at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and the Houghton Library at Harvard.

Vastel, Boston

As is evident from the title, this is a book on the mathematics of the game, a book on probability. Vastel was a lawyer and mathematician and translated the first part of Bernoulli's Ars Conjectandi into French in 1801. 

The book is in a lovely, but tight binding. The sewing threads are nowhere visible, so when I collated it, I had to rely on the signature marks. 

front board

spine

 

 

 

 

 

 

The book appears to collate 12^o: [1-2]^4/2 3-20^4/2 plus three leaves at the end. Numeric signing became common in the 19h century (see the discussion of the second book below); it is the imposition that I find most strange. I have never seen a duodecimo gathered in fours and twos. I commented about the unusual format to my friend J.P. Ascher and he pointed me to a 19th century printer's manual, William Savage, A Dictionary of the Art of Printing, London: Longman et al (1841). There is a large section of imposition diagrams and figure 36 is a half sheet of twelves, with two signatures, eight pages and four pages, as here. 

So the imposition scheme was known to contemporary printers, but why would it be used? A more normal scheme would be to have gatherings of six leaves, reducing the number of gatherings by half, and thus reducing the amount of sewing by the binder. Savage cited a number of earlier printer's manuals for this imposition scheme and, unlike Savage, they clarified why a printer might want to use it. I'll mention only one of many examples. Stower, The Compositor's and Pressman's Guide to the Art of Printing, London: Crosby (1808) called the imposition scheme "half sheet of twelves with two signatures, being 8 concluding pages of a work, and 4 of other matter." 

Ah! That makes perfect sense. If 8 pages will complete a duodecimo, you could use this imposition to set 4 pages of another book, or some advertising, or any other job work. But, but but--why would you set an entire book this way? It remains a mystery to me. 

The second acquisition is a translation of Hoyle's Whist into French, published by Fournier in the late 1780s. Fournier published many editions the Almanach des Jeux from 1779 into the 19th century. The Almanach included a calendar and sections on the games of whist, reversis, tressette, piquet, and trictrac. The individual sections were often published separately, as with whist:

Fournier, Whisk

As mentioned many times in this blog, I do like books in original unsophisticated bindings as here:

drab paper cover

This book, like Vastel above, is signed numerically, collating 12^o: 1-4¹² 5⁶ (-5₆ missing, blank?). In general, the second leaf is signed with an asterisk, and the fifth with two, such as 1* and 1**. This would help the binder make sure the gathering is folded and quired correctly, but the numeric signing is unusual. The bible for signing practices is an article by R. A. Sayce in The Library (5th ser, XXII:1 1966), "Compositorial Practices and the Localization of Printed Books, 1530-1800." Sayce studied nearly 3000 books and examined others more casually, and wrote about numeric signing: 

This, perhaps the commonest method of signing in the nineteenth century and after, is found in only three cases in the sample, two from Paris (1755, 1788) and one from Parma (1795). 

I can now add another Parisian example from the 18th century. I haven't seen other Cherbourg imprints from the early 19th century and can't say how common numeric signing might have been in 1815.  

I hope these two French delights mean the collecting dry spell is over!