Second Anniversary: Continuities and Disruptions

Today marks the second anniversary of my Hoyle blog. As you will see below, the title does not refer to the blog! Some quick data on the past two years before I clarify the title:

• This is essay number 89 and if they average approximately 750 words, I have written in excess of 65,000 words or more than 200 pages worth of text.
• My pace has slowed from the first year in which I wrote 64 posts, slightly more than one a week. The 25 that have been written average to a post every fortnight.
• Total page views will reach 18,000 today, most of which are from serious readers, though some are marketers trying to make money from my work.
• The most popular posts are those that I have linked to on mailing lists or bulletin boards. Three of the top five provided background for queries I posted to the Exlibris listserv. Two of these concerned the Rimington-Wilson Library ("The J. W. Rimington-Wilson Library (part 1)" and "More on Rimington-Wilson's Chess Manuscript ") and one asked about a seeming inconsistency in the ownership of the Hoyle copyright, with the group's received wisdom summarized here. Number three in terms of popularity was “Eighteenth Century Backgammon Literature” which I shared on the backgammon forum BGOnline. That essay will be reprinted next month in a British Backgammon periodical. 

My future plans for the blog revolve around my other publishing ambitions. I have a second journal article that has been stuck at 60% completion for more than a year. I have a research trip planned next month that I expect to provide the information that will enable its completion. I have thoughts for another journal article or two.

My longer-term dream is to write a book about Hoyle. I originally conceived of the book as a descriptive bibliography of editions of Hoyle through 1800, with essays on topics in bibliography and book history that arise in the study of the Hoyle canon. Many of the essays were to be based on work originally published in this blog.

As I have started to outline and write sections of the book, I find myself considering major changes in both its scope and organization. The insight that is leading me to change is this:

Hoyle was published from 1742 to 1865 as a relatively continuous and hugely successful business enterprise centered in London. The enterprise was built on Hoyle as a brand, rather than Hoyle as an author.

This insight is recent. The continuity is easy to miss when confronted by the roughly 200 18th century books that could be considered editions of Hoyle (by including his writing, or by using his name as author or in the title). Carry on to 1850 and there are another 150 candidates with more beyond. The continuity is also easy to miss when one focuses on the text of Hoyle. Hoyle's last writing was in 1763. Other editors and writers added so frequently to the text that Hoyle's contribution is barely discernible, yet titles such as The New Hoyle, Hoyle Abridged, or Hoyle Made Familiar abound.

The continuity is more apparent when one focuses on the 75 books that make up the mainstream of Hoyle. These fall neatly into three groups, linked by the booksellers that published them:

• First are the 45 authorized books consisting entirely of writing by Hoyle, published through 1775. The copyright was owned first by Hoyle, then by Francis Cogan (see "Bibliography of the Cogan Hoyles"), and then Thomas Osborne (see for example "The First Osborne Hoyles", "The Osborne Collections of Hoyle ", "Mr. Hoyle's Treatises", and "Reissues of Mr. Hoyle's Treatises "). Upon Osborne's death in 1767, a group of assignees headed by Richard Baldwin continued to publish Hoyle.


• In the aftermath of Becket vs. Donaldson, Hoyle was in the public domain and a number of competing versions came out. Swift action and shrewd marketing allowed Baldwin and others (notably the Longman firm) to maintain market dominance with Hoyle’s Games Improved. The book, edited by Charles Jones, still contained much of Hoyle’s writing, but each of its 11 editions (and a greater number of separate issues) through 1826, added new games and new authors. See for example "The Most Important Hoyle after Hoyle", and "Hoyle's Games Improved, Charles Jones (1800)".


• Longman and others brought out six editions of Hoyle’s Games Improved and Enlarged from 1835 to 1865, edited by someone known only by the initials G. H. I have not discussed the book in this blog. The textual link to Hoyle becomes further attenuated, even as his name stays in the title. Yet crucially, the publishers remain the same and the books are dominant in the London market, despite substantial competition.

One sees, through these 75 books, the building of a Hoyle brand by Cogan, Osborne, Baldwin, and Longman. And I'm seeing my bibliography less as an author bibliography of Edmond Hoyle and more as a business bibliography--the development of the Hoyle brand.

The remaining Hoyles, perhaps 300 in the years 1742 to 1865 are of mixed significance. Some were quite disruptive, requiring a response from the mainstream publishers if they were to maintain leadership. The disruptions include the piracies of 1743, the proliferation of competitors with the end of perpetual copyright in 1774, and novel new series such as The New Pocket Hoyle in 1802. The main publishers of Hoyle withstood these disruptions and more, and their responses are evident in the text, the physical books, and their marketing.

There were other publications of Hoyle’s work that did not disrupt the main enterprise. Obvious candidates include reprints of Hoyle in Ireland (which had its own continuities and disruptions), reprints in America, and translations on the Continent. None of these efforts competed significantly with London, nor did they require a response from the London publishers. Equally inconsequential to London were one-time piracies and one-off editions (such as the Brambles edition, described here) that did not pose a serious marketing threat.

I am now thinking that I want to organize both the bibliography and the essays around the theme of business continuities and disruptions in the creation of the Hoyle brand. The implication is that the bibliography won’t be organized in a typical fashion. Many bibliographies are arranged as a strict chronology. Others are organized by title, and within title, different editions and issues are organized chronologically. The former approach seems appropriate for a bibliography for a printing house or publisher. The latter is typical for an author bibliography and is useful as a precursor to textual and literary criticism. I can’t really imagine anyone interested in producing a critical edition of Hoyle, nor engaging in literary criticism—neither of those reflects what is important about Hoyle.

What would a bibliography organized around the Hoyle brand look like? The first major section would discuss the mainstream effort from 1742 to 1865. The second section would be the 1743 piracies which were hugely disruptive and greatly affected the evolution of the Hoyle product and its marketing. Next would be the disruptions brought about with the competition in the wake of Beckett v Donaldson, and so on. Separate sections would be the Dublin and American reprints which were neither part of the continuous main narrative, nor did they disrupt it.

A consequence of this organization is that editions of a single work would be spread across multiple sections. For example the authorized London editions of A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist would appear in the main section, the important “Webster” and “Webb” editions in a section on the 1743 piracies, and the Irish reprints of Whist in a third section. This might make it difficult to follow the transmission of the text, but I expect that judicious notes and appendices would provide connections that otherwise might be lost.

A second consequence is that my original plan to stop at the artificial date of 1800 does not make sense. Many of the publishing efforts--the mainline work of Baldwin and Longman, the infuriating chapbooks by Robert Withy, and the competition from Pigott--straddle that year. Going beyond 1800 introduces a lot of one-off works such as the miniature published in Dundee, that are neither continuities nor disruptions.

A third consequence is that the essays will tie more closely to the sections of the descriptive bibliography. For example, I’ve written a great deal in this blog about the Dublin reprints. Both that writing and the books it describes are logically separable from everything else. Clarity would be lost if the descriptive bibliography mixed the Dublin reprints with the underlying London texts.

In his landmark Principles of Bibliographical Description, Fredson Bowers writes that every bibliography “should have a unified subject, a definite purpose expressed in its arrangement and in its treatment of the books described so that a shaping intelligence guides the work.” (page 18). I’m coming to the conclusion that while my unified subject is Hoyle, the nature of the material is not suited to the format of a typical author bibliography. What seems to connect the books is that evolution of the Hoyle product and brand in the face of stringent competition. I’ve never seen a bibliography organized the way I am proposing, yet it seems to be the best way to rationalize an extremely complex series of books.

Lastly, do not fear that what I'm contemplating is no longer descriptive bibliography. The marketing battles left numerous fascinating traces in the physical books.

I’d be anxious to hear from anyone who has thoughts about my proposal.

More on The Covent Garden Magazine

Last essay, I discussed my recent visit to the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. My travels continued to the main campus at UCLA where I visited Special Collections at the Young Research Library. There were a half dozen copies of Hoyle I wished to examine, but the real draw for me was copies of The Covent Garden Magazine, which I had written about previously.

The magazine, published by George Allen from July 1772, contains a mixture of erotica and essays on gaming. Some of the gaming essays are collected into The Annals of Gaming, printed for G. Allen, 1775 and reissued with a cancel title page as a "second" edition by William Lane, T. Axtell, J Wenman and J. Williams, G. Corrall, , S. Hayes, J Lewis, and T. Lewis.

The UCLA catalogue lists seventeen monthly issues of The Covent Garden Magazine and according to the reading room rules, I could examine two issues at a time, but not take photographs. The issues turned out to be in near pristine condition--original blue printed wrappers with a table of contents on the front cover and a note to the public on the back. Each issue was 48 pages with two copperplate engravings, one article on a game, and the rest rather tame erotica.

My interest in seeing the magazine was to learn (1) what games were covered, (2) how much of the gaming material was reprinted in The Annals of Gaming, and (3) how much of the text was lifted from Hoyle. The first issues I saw were one, five, six, and nine.

Issue one contained a general introduction to the plan of introducing gaming literature without discussing any game in particular. Five contained lansquenet, a game not covered by Hoyle. Six and nine contained piquet and quadrille, two of Hoyle's games.

Comparing the treatment of piquet in issue six of December 1772 (pp220-4) with Hoyle's book on the game is fascinating. The article adds a two-paragraph description of the game. Next are two chapters copied verbatim from Hoyle: chapter I "General Rules for Playing at Piquet" and chapter VII "Laws of the Game at Piquet." Absent are Hoyle's meatier chapters on strategy, probability, and examples of good play. The article continues with a page on methods of cheating at piquet. Whether they are to instruct the cheater or to enable the honest player to detect cheating is open to debate.

Issue six, being at the end of the year, contained an index of the first six issues, in which I learned that issues two through four covered whist, hazard, and tennis.

Issue nine of March 1773, had the first of two articles on quadrille (pp86-92), which does not appear to be copied from Hoyle's 1744 work.

I next saw issue fourteen, with an article on "labelle, the flux, and thirty one," a game I had never heard of. I turned to Google to learn something about it and quickly found something that surprised me greatly--Google books had digitized the entire run of The Covent Garden Magazine! I can't believe I never ran across it before, and can only assume that the digitization was a fairly recent effort by Google.

With the full text of CGM available, I am able to expand on my earlier essay which was based solely on advertisements for the magazine. It turns out that the magazine continued publication until December 1775 and the full text of volumes  one, two, three, and four are freely available online. And, I am able to answer the questions I set out above.

What games were covered in the magazine? In the 42 issues, 37 games were covered. Of these, only the first dozen were reprinted word-for-word in the Annals of Gaming. The chart below shows the games, the issue, pages, and date where the game was discussed in The Covent Garden Magazine, and the pages where the same text was reprinted in the Annals of Gaming:

game	issue:pages	date	Annals
whist	2:61-68	1772-08	3-29
hazard	3:81-88	1772-09	30-45
tennis	4:122-6	1772-10	46-58
lansquenet	5:174-5	1772-11	59-65
piquet	6:220-224	1772-12	66-86
billiards	7:1-8	1773-01	87-113*
loo	8:58-70	1773-02	114-122
quadrille	9:86-92	1773-03	122-44
quadrille (continued)	10:133-140	1773-04	145-172
lottery	11:181-3	1773-05	173-80
backgammon	12:212-5	1773-06	181-193**
all-fours	13:241-3	1773-07	199-205
comet or pope joan	14:281-4	1773-08	206-16

*The Covent Garden Magazine issued annual volumes at the end of every year. There was a supplement to the second volume containing additional material on billiards that was included in the Annals of Gaming.

**Annals copied a few pages of Hoyle's Backgammon that did not first appear in CGM.

How much was copied from Hoyle? The article on whist plagiarized chapters one and three (and some other tables) from  Hoyle's treatise with some added material much like piquet, discussed above. The article on backgammon copies most of chapters two through five of Hoyle's treatise, plus the five laws of backgammon from the end of the book. So, at least for the games Hoyle covered, CGM and Annals copy substantially from Hoyle.

What I find most striking from this exercise is that the magazine copied Hoyle before Hoyle went off copyright.  See "Hoyle in the Public Domain (1775)." In that essay I discussed the flurry of Hoyle reprints that were published in 1775, including the Annals of Gaming. Now that I have had a chance to see CGM, it is clear that publisher Allen copied Hoyle before Donaldson v Beckett eliminated perpetual copyright. I suppose this is not surprising--Allen served time in jail for publishing an "indecent print" in The Covent Garden Magazine. A little copyright violation just added spice to the stew (or perhaps stew to the spice).

In any case, it is ironic that my visit to UCLA to see scattered issues of The Covent Garden Magazine should result in my finding the full run online.

Hoyles at the Clark

It's been more than a month since my April Fool's prank which caught several of you who should know better.  Since then I've been pretty silent. I have three essays in the pipeline with more details about the Webster piracy, but they are technical and will take more time to make comprehensible. Plus, I've been traveling. Since the travel included research visits to a couple of libraries, I thought I'd report on some of the more interesting books I saw.

First, I visited the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA. The grounds, building, and collections are all spectacular. The staff could not have been more helpful. I had a chance to look at eight 18th century editions of Hoyle, some of which are quite unusual.

Piquet.1.2
Clark Library copy

Most interesting was A Short Treatise on the Game of Piquet, printed for T. Osborne, 1745. As I discuss in the essay on the first Osborne Hoyles, Thomas Osborne bought the Hoyle copyright from struggling bookseller Francis Cogan in 1745. The purchase must have included unsold copies of some of the books as well, because Osborne reissued the Cogan editions of Piquet and Quadrille with cancel title pages. Osborne sold the treatises both individually, but more frequently as collections bound with other treatises.

The Quadrille reissues are fairly common--I've seen eight copies and know of several others. The reissue of Piquet is quite scarce, with only four copies known. The copies at the Bodleian, the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the American Contract Bridge League are bound with Whist, the Osborne reissue of Cogan's Quadrille, and Backgammon.The copy at the Clark is the only survivor that appears to have been issued individually.

I wish that Piquet had survived in its original binding. Cogan likely sold it in Dutch paper wrappers, an example of which can be seen online in the digital collections of the Beinecke Library at Yale. I suppose that Cogan did not go to the expense of putting on the decorative paper of his entire inventory, but only when the book was displayed in his shop for sale. Osborne, on the other hand, sold the Hoyles in drab blue wrappers, such as the one pictured here. How was the reissue sold? Was it originally in Dutch paper wrappers? Would Osborne have removed them? We'll probably never know.

Whist. Webb piracy
Levy [1534]

The current binding of Piquet at the Clark is a delightful surprise--one that is quite familiar to me. I have an equally rare and identically bound copy of a piracy of Whist, printed for W. Webb, 1742 (although both the name Webb and the date 1742 are fictitious). And I do mean identical--the cloth, the leather, the red label, the lettering, and even the brass ornament are the same in both. Compare the details of the spines below. The color difference are in part an artifact of photography and in part due to the better preservation of Piquet. 

Piquet. Osborne reissue. Clark Library copy

Whist. Webb piracy

Both books contain a stamp indicating that they were bound by Bayntun (Riviere) of Bath England.

Whist. Webb piracy. Binder's stamp.

The names Riviere and Bayntun will be familiar to anyone familiar with rare books. Robert Riviere (1808-82) was a fine London bookbinder. George Bayntun (1873-1940) was a bookseller and binder in Bath. The Baytun family continues to operate a bookshop in central Bath as well as the Bayntun-Riviere bindery.

How did two identical bindings come to be and how did they end up in different collections? I purchased Whist at auction in 2004. It bears the bookplate of William Tarun Fehsenfeld, a Baltimore antiques dealer who died in 1995. The Clark acquired Piquet in 1970 from the Nottingham bookseller Ian H. R. Cowley. It is probable, then, that Baytun bound both books some time before 1970, perhaps for the Nottingham dealer, or perhaps for a collector. I can't help but wonder if other books--other Hoyles?--might have been bound at the same time. I'll get in touch with Baytun and see if they might have records to fill in more details.

Seeing Piquet was the highlight of my visit to the Clark. There were some other notable items:

• An Osborne collection of Hoyle, as discussed here. The Clark copy consists of Whist.6, BG.2, Quad.2, and Piquet.2 with each of the individual treatises autographed by Hoyle. It may have once contained a copy of the Laws of Whist. The impressions left on remaining pages were not as convincing as those pictured here. If the Laws were present, the book would fit perfectly in the third group of Osborne collections. 
• One of three surviving copies of Games.1.4, a reissue of Hoyle's treatises discussed here. The others are at the Bodleian and Vanderbilt. 
• A French translation of Whist dated 1765 that I had never seen before. It does not have a place of publication or a publisher, so more work is required to learn more about it. 

It was a delightful visit to The Clark. The next day I went on to the UCLA campus and visited Special Collections. They had many issues of The Covent Garden Magazine, which I will discuss in a future essay.

The Hoyle Manuscript

Updated: April 2, 2013. Well, I got a few of you with this April Fool's Day post. Everything up to and including the two letters from the 1750s is accurate (though I believe the letters to be satiric) and everything after is the product of my imagination. I'm still looking for a copy of the Hoyle manuscript. There's no fool like an April fool!

I had always thought that the essay "An Insomniac's Reward" would be the most dramatic story of an addition to my collection, the rare Laws of Whist Designed for Framing. I think you will find this story of the Hoyle manuscript even more astonishing!

I have discussed the first edition of Hoyle's first book, A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist, many times on these pages. See, for example, the essay "A Discovery at the Morgan Library." Internal evidence in Whist makes it is clear that Hoyle circulated a earlier manuscript version of that work among his whist students. The awkward title to Chapter XIV is:

Some purchasers of the treatise in manuscript, disposed of the last winter, having desired a further explanation concerning the playing of sequences, they are explained in the following manner. (page 74)

Hoyle goes on to give 13 pages of explanation of sequences and other miscellaneous topics. The first edition was published in November 1742, so "last winter" must refer to the winter of 1741-2.

The book opens with another hint about what must have been the contents of the manuscript:

The author of this treatise did promise, if it met with approbation, to make an addition to it by way of appendix, which he has done accordingly. (page 1)

At the bottom of page 46 is the comment "What follows in this treatise is the addition promised." The inference is that the manuscript consisted of roughly the first 46 pages of the 86 page first edition.

No copies of the manuscript are known to survive. I've been looking without success for a copy for decades in institutional collections, in private collections, and in dealer catalogues. Several years ago I began to undertake a different approach. There are two letters published in contemporary periodicals from students of Hoyle. Perhaps they had copies that could be tracked down?

An anonymous letter published in The Rambler of May 8, 1750 reads:

Papa made me drudge at whist 'till I was tired of it; and far from wanting a head, Mr Hoyle, when he had not given me above forty lessons, said I was one of his best scholars.

Alas, the anonymity makes it impossible to track down the author.

More promising is The London Daily Advertiser and Literary Gazette of September 16, 1751, where "Draperia" writes:

Be sure, sir, to insist particularly on my skill at whist: I have had the honour to be taught that noble game by Mr. Hoyle himself, and not even Lady Lurchwell knows how many cards are out, so well as I do.

Updated April 2, 2013. Everything above is factual. Everything below is fanciful.

I had thought the pseudonym Draperia to be a dead end until I discovered an unpublished doctoral dissertation, The Key to the Literary Gazette (Amherst: University of Massachusetts 1992), which relied on archival records of the publisher N. Jackson to identify many of the otherwise-unknown authors.

It turns out that Draperia is one Alice Browne. That name started me on a long course of research, which I present here in much abbreviated form. Browne, the daughter of prosperous London draper George Browne, must have fashioned her pseudonym from her father's profession. George Browne took on Daniel Mead (sometimes spelled Meade) as an apprentice in the early 1740s, and, as happens not infrequently, Mead married his master's daughter in the early 1750s. Mead carried on as a successful merchant, as did Alice and Daniel's son (also Daniel) and grandson (Henry Meade). Henry left London with his merchant profits to start a textile factory in Lancashire in the 1790s, one of the earliest to bring steam power (a modified Newcomen engine) to textile manufacturing.

Henry Meade and his sons were hugely successful, first with wool and later cotton. They were major employers near the town of Preston, and eventually built a country home, Meade Manor, to the north. The genealogical and probate records become a bit unclear from the turn of the 19th century and I haven't had a chance to research the land records. From what I can gather, it appears that Meade Manor and the surrounding lands stayed in the family until the 20th century. Before World War I, the family was forced to sell parcel after parcel of the surrounding land to keep up the home. The last of the Meades apparently died in the war and the property was boarded up and abandoned.

Somehow, the property managed to avoid demolition and in 2007, a developer gained approval from the county and from taxing authorities to turn the home into privates flats. I was hopeful that the property would then be opened and the contents could be checked for a Hoyle manuscript that Alice Browne might have owned. Alas, the credit crisis delayed the project for years and only in 2012 was the developer to obtain financing.

I contacted the developer to learn that there was a large volume of "not particularly interesting" furniture and family possessions in the home. The developer engaged a Lancashire auction house to sell the contents. Their plan was to hold a series of auctions, first the furniture, then the books, and then the rest of the contents. The furniture sale was in January, followed by a poorly catalogued book and art sale in February. Unable to determine from the descriptions (such as "lot of 19th century literature") whether a Hoyle manuscript might be present, I engaged Paul, a student at nearby Lancaster University to attend the pre-sale. Alas, no Hoyle, and indeed, no gaming books whatsoever turned up.

The third sale of "household" contents was scheduled for March and even more poorly catalogued, really little more than a series of cartons. But some lots were apparently writings ("carton of gamekeeper journals" or "carton of household records"). With the barest possibility of locating a manuscript, I asked Paul to return to the pre-sale and, gulp, look through the 150 odd cartons.

And, THERE IT WAS, in carton 47 ("carton of 19th century correspondence") was a copy of the Hoyle manuscript. The auction was not until the next day and frankly, I was a wreck. Paul was able to represent me at the auction and I gave him a huge bidding limit, the promise of a major bonus if successful, and swore him to silence until the auction was over.

The auction itself was a non-event. We were successful at £37.50!!!! The manuscript is on its way to California. I guess I'll remain a wreck until it arrives.

Paul says that judging from Hoyle autographs I shared with him, the manuscript is not in Hoyle's hand--Hoyle must have hired a scrivener. There is an intriguing inscription, however, that does appear to be in Hoyle's hand: "To Alice, my finest and fairest pupil, Edmond." Rather forward for the mid-18th century, don't you think?

More when this treasure arrives safely!

Information Whist

A bookseller once asked me an odd question. Knowing of my interest in books on the game of whist and knowing that whist had pretty much died out, he asked what was my newest book on the game. The answer is a small pamphlet called Information Whist, published in my home town of San Francisco.

Sloan, Information Whist
Levy [0156]

The work is an eight-page pamphlet with stiff covers and text printed on the inside rear cover as a ninth page. The author is W. A Sloan and the book is published at 4024 Eighteenth Street, San Francisco, Calif. More information about the author and the address appears below. I wish there were a colophon telling who printed the book.



From everything I can tell, mine is the only surviving copy of this work. It's not listed in WorldCat or any of the catalogues of California libraries. None of the whist collectors I know seem to have a copy. I purchased it more than 20 years ago at a second hand book shop. It was tucked in the back of the most common whist book of all, a late reprint of Cavendish on Whist, first published in 1862, a work I discuss in the essay "The Successors to Hoyle (part 1)". The bookseller was delighted to let me have both for five dollars.

The title page contains a rather silly verse, foreshadowing the Rhyming Rules for Whist, discussed below:

All whist players for the prize aspire
And fight for all tricks that they require.
From this little book take your advice
Then your partner's sure to treat you nice.

In the pre-Google days, I went to the San Francisco Public Library and looked through old telephone books and city directories trying to identify the author and learn when the book was written. I found that his full name is Wolsey A. Sloan, and he moved to 18th Street about 1920 with his wife Lucy P. Sloan. He was employed as a boilermaker in the early 1920s and became a rent collector for the real estate firm of Umbsen, Kerner, and Eisert. He died in 1946 and Lucy lived at the same address until 1960. So the pamphlet dates between 1920 and 1946.

With Google, and his unusual first name, it is not hard to learn more about the Sloans. The site findagrave.com gives details for both Wolsey and Lucy. Wolsey was born December 4, 1861 in Ohio and died May 20, 1947 in Alameda, just across the Bay from San Francisco. Lucy was a California girl, born in July 21, 1860. She died in San Francisco on August 8, 1960. The two are buried together in the Golden Gate National Cemetery, sharing a gravestone with his details on one side and hers on the other.

Wolsey was an army private, serving in the Indian Wars of the late 19th century. His first person account of serving with Troop H, Fourth U. S. Cavalry, appeared in the July 30, 1935 issue of Winners of the West, a periodical issued by the National Indian War Veterans Association. It was reprinted in Indian War Veterans, Memories of Army Life and Campaigns in the West, 1864-1898, edited by Jerome A. Greene (New York: Savas Beatie, 2007).

The Chicago Blue Book of 1895 shows Wolsey and Lucy living together at 607 Chestnut Street, the same address as Mrs. C. E. Sloan, presumably his mother. A 1910 census shows him living in Washington State.

4024 Eighteenth Street is in the Castro District of San Francisco, just a block and a half from the famous Castro Theatre, built in 1922 just after the Sloans moved to 18th Street. Pictures of the duplex appear below. The Sloans would no doubt be shocked to learn that the property is worth seven figures today!

4024 18th Street duplex

Detail of 4024 18th Street

The pamphlet itself consolidates useful strategies for playing whist. What is most interesting, in my opinion, is the Rhyming Rules of Whist on pages 8-9, pictured below. The rhyme begins:

If you desire the game of Whist to know
From these set rules it simple precepts flow,
Treat your hand as to your partners bound.
Both combine as one, or both confound.

Sloan's Rhyming Rules
Levy [1296]

As awkward as the rhyme is, it is not original! Rhyming rules for whist date back to the British whist expert William Pole. He published his Rhyming Rules, printed on a card, entitled Pocket Precepts in 1864. Pole's rules, pictured below, begin quite similarly:

If you the modern game of Whist would know
From this great principle its precepts flow:
Treat your own hand as to your partner's joined,
And play, not one alone, but both combined.

Pole's Rhyming Rules for Whist

Sloan's debt to Pole is obvious, but what I find interesting are the few substantive changes. For example both recommend the same honor leads. For example, Pole: "In this, with ace and king, lead king then ace." Sloan: "Holding Ace and King lead King, then Ace." The two carry on similarly for leads from KQ, AQJ, Axxxx and QJT. Otherwise, Pole says, "In other cases, you the lowest lead" while Sloan says "In other cases the fourth best lead."

The change in partnership agreement from lowest to fourth best occurred in the 1870s was recommended by Nicolas Trist of New Orleans and Henry Jones ("Cavendish") of London. The changes came to be known as American Leads in honor of Mr. Trist and were widely adopted by serious whist players. Sloan, then, did more than just plagiarize Pole, he updated Pole's rhymes to current practice.

I've devoted this long entry to a late and rather unimportant book on whist. I do so first because its rarity might be of interest to other whist collectors. More than that, perhaps a grandchild of the Sloans will find this essay through Google and get in touch so that I can learn more about how it came to be written!

More on Rimington-Wilson's Chess Manuscript (part 2)

My posts on the Rimington-Wilson chess manuscript have proved quite popular. Its tangled provenance and the question of whether it was penned by Oliver Goldsmith, as was once thought, make an engaging biblio-mystery.

The story of the manuscript appears in two essays: "The J. W. Rimington-Wilson Library (part 1)" and "More on Rimington-Wilson's Chess Manuscript." I have received quite a few emails, primarily from members of the EXLIBRIS listserv, adding new color and detail. Let me summarize the story so far, with a bit more precision about chronology, and then add new material suggested by EXLIBRIS readers. The summary:

1. Bolton Corney (1784-1870), a literary critic and antiquary, owned a manuscript translation of Vida's 1527 poem Scacchia Ludus (The Game of Chess) said to be in the hand of Oliver Goldsmith. Corney  wrote and edited a number of books, the most relevant of which is Goldsmith's Poetical Works, Illustrated, with a Memoir (1846). (ODNB). Corney's book does not contain the chess poem, although it mentions a fragmentary translation of another poem by Vida.


2. The manuscript is described by John Forster in his Life of Goldsmith (1848) based on Forster's examination of the Corney copy. I quoted the description extensively in the last blog essay, noting that the description seemed a bit strained as to authenticity. One EXLIBRIS reader suggested that Forster was not concerned with authenticity, but whether the manuscript was "an original work by Goldsmith or a work which he merely transcribed." Rereading the passage, I find myself agreeing with the reader. In any case, it seems reasonable that Bolton acquired the manuscript after the work he edited in 1846, but before Forster wrote about his copy in 1848.


3. In 1871, after Corney's death, chess collector J. W. Rimington-Wilson purchases the manuscript from the London bookseller F. S. Ellis. Rimington-Wilson dies in 1877. The chess collection, including the Vida manuscript, stays in the Rimington-Wilson family, passing to son Reginald Henry Rimington-Wilson. (1852-1927).


4. In 1926,  Katharine C. Balderston writes A Census of the Manuscripts of Oliver Goldsmith attributing the Vida manuscript to Oliver Goldsmith. She is unable to trace the manuscript prior to the ownership of Bolton Corney.


5. R. H. Rimington-Wilson dies in 1927 and his nephew, Captain H. E. Rimington-Wilson, orders the sale of the library by auction at Sotheby's in February 1928. The Vida manuscript is the most important lot in the sale, with a reproduction of the first page appearing on the cover of the catalogue. Two letters from Ellis to J. W. R-W relating to the sale of the manuscript are included with the lot.


6. The London bookseller Maggs purchases the manuscript at the R-W sale for £5600. Maggs is acting on behalf of the Philadelphia book dealer Charles Sessler. 


7. Sessler sells the book to composer Jermone Kern for $32,998.10. 


8. The manuscript is offered at the legendary Kern auction at Anderson Galleries in January 1929. The New York Times reports that someone named Perkins purchased the lot for $27,000, but he returns  it to Kern, claiming that it was not in the hand of Oliver Goldsmith as claimed. 


9. Kern attempts to return the manuscript to Sessler. Sessler refuses to return the money, claiming that the manuscript is in the hand of Goldsmith. Kern brings suit in the Federal District Court of Philadelphia for return of the the sale price. 

Now for two new bits of color, both relating to the Kern sale, from two EXLIBRIS readers. 

First, Travis McDade, Curator of Law Rare Books at the University of Illinois College of Law pointed me to a brief first person account of the Kern sale by Robert Coates called “Books at a Million” in the New Yorker of January 19, 1929:

A copy of Goldsmith's "Vida's Sacchis, or Chess," starting at ten thousand dollars as we prepared to go, had reached twenty-five thousand before we found our gloves. Only the experts know why some items sell for larger amounts than others. Rosenbach's [about whom more below] interest in a book or manuscript, however, usually sends it pretty high before it is sold. Thus he had to go to seventeen thousand five hundred for a thin, faded green volume written by Elizabeth Barrett Browning when she was eleven years old, a price three times as much as was paid for a first edition of Boswell's "Johnson," with autographed letters of both Johnson and Boswell thrown in. (page 9)

Second, Stephen Tabor, Curator of Early Printed Books at the Huntington Library, pointed me to Rosenbach, A Biography, by Edwin Wolf 2nd and John F. Fleming (1936). A. W. S. Rosenbach (1876-1952) was a flamboyant Philadelphia book dealer who helped develop the collections at the Huntington and the Folger and was a bookseller to J. P. Morgan. He was a major bidder at the Kern sale where prices reached "dizzy heights." While Rosenbach apparently did not bid on the Vida manuscript, the biography notes his involvement:

Goldsmith shared in the boom. Of course excepting the so-called autograph manuscript of a translation of Vida's Scacchis, or Chess. Sessler had bought it for Kern at the Rimington Wilson sale at Sotheby's a year earlier for almost $33,000, but at $27,000 Owen Young beat out Sessler for it. After the sale and a converstaion with the Doctor [that is, with Rosenbach] he returned it to Anderson's as "wrong." Dr. Rosenbach was convinced that it was not in Goldsmith's hand, and although Miss Balderston, the greatest Goldsmith expert, had nodded in its favor before the sale, she was convinced afterward that she had not studied it carefully enough. The manuscript was returned to Kern and in the middle thirties, he was still trying to get it reinstated as genuine. (pages 310-1)

It is unclear why the New York Times reports the purchaser as Perkins, while here the purchaser is said to be Owen Young. 

The Rosenbach biography is anecdotal rather than scholarly. As Wolf notes in the preface,

Some of the stories Dr. Rosenbach told about himself are included here to give a Rosenbachian flavor to the book. Like most folk tales they have been passed down from mouth to mouth and may have been altered in the telling, but like most folk tales they are revealing of the circumstances in which they were reputed to have taken place. (pages 7-8)

With that caveat, the biography indicates the indirect involvement of Balderston and Rosenbach at the Kern sale and shows the manuscript still in Kern's possession in the mid-1930s. Oddly, Kern who sued Sessler claiming the manuscript was not in Goldsmith's hand, was claiming it to be genuine in later years.

Many questions remain:

• Where is the manuscript now?
• What was the resolution of the litigation between Kern and Sessler? 
• Is the manuscript in Goldsmith's hand?

I do think it will take research in Philadelphia to extend the story and answer the nagging questions.Until then, we can trace the manuscript from Bolton Corney in the 1840s to the collection of J. W. Rimington-Wilson and on to Jerome Kern as late as the mid-1930s. Can we add to this 90 year history?

More on Rimington-Wilson's Chess Manuscript

In the essay "The J. W. Rimington-Wilson Library (part 1)," I wrote about the February 1928 Sotheby's sale of the Rimington-Wilson chess library. The most interesting lot was a manuscript said to be in the hand of Oliver Goldsmith, a translation of Vida's 1527 poem Scacchia Ludus (The Game of Chess). The London bookseller Maggs purchased the lot for the astonishing sum of  £5600. 

I wondered where the manuscript was today and was interested in learning more generally about finding aids for 18th century manuscripts. I posted a query to the EXLIBRIS listserv, and members there helped me trace the manuscript for another year. In January 1929, the manuscript was sold in the major sale of the Jerome Kern collection at Anderson Galleries. The Vida manuscript sold for $27,000 (see American Book Prices Current, VOL. XXXV, available for download).

I recently had the pleasure of meeting Anthony Tedeschi, Rare Books Librarian at the Dunedin Public Libraries in New Zealand. Anthony writes a charming and recommended blog on rare books and special collections in Australasia—Antipodean Footnotes. Anthony pointed me to a June 17, 1930 headline in the New York Times that both added detail and intrigue to the manuscript's provenance. The headline read "NEW YORK COMPOSER SUES BOOK DEALER" and the sub-head continued "Jerome Kern Seeks Return of $32,998.10 Paid Philadelphian for Translation by Goldsmith." Intrigue indeed.

The text of the article highlights the path from Rimington-Wilson to Kern and beyond:

Jerome Kern of Bronxville, N. Y., composer of "Show Boat" and other musical plays, brought suit in the Federal court here today against Charles Sessler of Merion, well-known book dealer, asking for the return of $32,998.10, the purchase price of Oliver Goldsmith's translation of Vida's "Game of Chess."

Mr. Kern declares he bought the manuscript, which is composed of 679 lines of 34 pages, from Mr. Sessler on the latter's representation that it was in Goldsmith's handwriting. On Jan. 29, 1929, he contends, he learned that the handwriting was not Goldsmith's and says that the manuscript therefore is "of no value whatever." In his complaint the composer asserts that he has demanded the return of the money on several occasions, but that Mr. Sessler has refused to refund it. 

The Philadelphia dealer in February, 1928, purchased through an agent in London the purported manuscript of the translation at a reported price of $28,000 and sold it to Mr. Kern. Early last year the composer included it with the rest of his notable private collection of rare books and manuscripts which he placed on the auction block. The collection netted him almost $1,8000,000. 

The manuscript, which was catalogued at the sale as the longest poetical manuscript by Goldsmith known to exist, went for $27,000 to a bidder whose name was given out after the sale as Mr. Perkins. The bidding had opened at $10,000. 

Mr. Sessler said that the purchase of the manuscript at the auction returned it to Mr. Kern, but the Philadelphia dealer declared he personally still believed it was in Goldsmith's own handwriting.

So, it appears that Maggs was acting on behalf of Sessler at the Rimington-Wilson sale and Sessler sold the manuscript to Kern.

With the authenticity of the manuscript called into question, I returned to the Sotheby's catalogue for the Rimington-Wilson sale for their description and provenance:

THE LONGEST POETICAL MANUSCRIPT BY OLIVER GOLDSMITH KNOWN TO EXIST. Katherine C. Balderston in her Census (New York, 1926) records only three others; two copies of The Capitivity and the rejected Epilogue to She Stoops to Conquer. The manuscript now offered is longer than all these together it was formerly in the possession of Bolton Corney, and was described by Forster in his Life of Goldsmith, 1848, but remained unpublished in its entirety until 1855, when it was included in Peter Cunningham's edition of the Works. Corney died in 1870, and the manuscript was sold by Mr. F. S. Ellis to Mr. J. W. Rimington-Wilson in the following year. Miss Balderston was unable to trace its history beyond Bolton Corney. Two letters from Mr Ellis relating to its sale are included with the lot.

AUTOGRAPH MANUSCRIPTS OF OLIVER GOLDSMITH ARE OF EXTRAORDINARY RARITY. 

We can delve a bit deeper, looking at the description by Forster in his Life of Goldsmith:

[I shall describe] Vida's Game of Chess in the English heroic metre, as it has been found transcribed in the writing of Oliver Goldsmith by my friend Mr. Bolton Corney, whose property it is and who kindly permits my use of it.

It is a small quarto manuscript of thirty-four pages, containing 679 lines, to which a fly-leaf is appended, in which Goldsmith notes the differences of nomenclature between Vida's chessmen and our own. It has occasional interlineations and corrections, but rather such as would occur in transcription than in a first or original copy. Sometimes, indeed, choice appears to have been made (as at page 29) between two words equally suitable to the sense and verse, as "to" for "toward;" but the insertions and ensures refer almost wholly to words or lines accidentally omitted and replaced. The triplet is always carefully marked and though it is seldom found in any other of Goldsmith's poems, I am disposed to regard its frequent recurrence here as even helping in some degree to explain the motive which had led him to the trial of an experiment in rhyme comparatively new to him. If we suppose him, half-consciously it may be, taking up the manner of the great master of translation, Dryden, who was at all times so much a favourite with him, he would certainly be less apt to fall short in so marked a peculiarity than to err, perhaps, a little on the side of excess—though I am far from thinking such to be the result in the present instance. The effect of the whole translation is really very pleasing, and the mock heroic effect appears to be not a little assisted by the reiterated use of the triplet and  alexandrine. As to any evidences of authorship derivable from the appearance of the manuscript, it is only necessary to add another word. The lines in the translation have been carefully counted, and the number is marked in Goldsmith's hand at the dose of his transcription. Such a fact is of course only to be taken in aid of other proof; but a man is not generally at the pains of counting,—still less, I should say, in such a case as Goldsmith's, of elaborately transcribing,—lines which are not his own.

Forster is at pains, it seems to me, perhaps due to his friendship with Corney, to describe the manuscript as authentic. His comments about such details at the marking of triplets and the counting of lines are rather strained.

I am still hopeful of locating the manuscript.I have found no online information about the litigation between Kern and Sessler, nor are there digital copies of Philadelphia newspapers available from that time. So more digging is required. Anthony had some other suggestions for further research. He notes that the Sessler papers are held by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, with a finding aid for the archive online. There is a substantial Kern archive at the Library of Congress, although that appears to relate only to his music.

Next time I'm in Philadelphia....

A page from the manuscript

In the mean time, the Sotheby's catalogue of the Rimington-Wilson catalogue included a reproduction from the Vida manuscript, which I include here with the thought that someone may be expert in identifying Goldsmith's handwriting.