2025: The Year in Collecting

I added some wonderful books to my collection in 2025. You saw two of them in the essay "2025: The Year of McTear". Of the others, many came from the final Ricky Jay sale. Jay (1946-2018) was the preeminent stage magician of his generation and a collector of magic, broadly interpreted. I dreaded running into him at book fairs as there was a small, but significant overlap in our interests. My niche is instructional books about games. His passion for magic included the sorts of stage techniques that are also used to cheat at cards or dice. A book on card games with warnings on how to detect frauds in play would be of interest to both of us. If truth be told, a manual on the detection of cheating equally serves to instruct the cheater. 

The first sale of Ricky Jay items was at Sotheby's  in 2021, followed by three at Potter and Potter in 2023-4. The items I bought were from the final sale at Forum Auction. The first two items had an indirect connection to Hoyle. 

In the late eighteenth century, the market leading Hoyle was Hoyle's Games Improved edited by Charles Jones. One of the challengers was the New Hoyle from the manuscript of the late Charles Pigott and published by James Ridgway and H. D. Symonds. Each new edition of HGI or the New Hoyle would introduce new games, trying to outdo the other. Pigott.1.1 (February 1796) introduced cribbage, faro, matrimony, and rouge et noir. Jones.5 (March 1796) included those four games and added cassino and connexions. Pigott.1.3 (April 1796) included the two new games and added all fours and put. Jones.6 (May 1800) caught up and added another five games and the escalation was over. 

Williams, Cribbage
Levy [2222] 

 

It was not Pigott who udpated the New Hoyle--he died in 1794. Instead, Ridgway and Symonds incorporated text from other books they published. In 1791 Ridgway published A Treatise on the Game of Cribbage by John Williams, who wrote under the pseudonym Anthony Pasquin. Jay was undoubtedly attracted to this book because it had a brief section on how to cheat at cribbage by manipulating cards. 

 

 

Faro (1793)
Levy[2224]

 

Faro and rouge et noir came from a book published in 1793 by John Debrett, an associate of Ridgway and Symonds. I was pleased to find copies of the two books that contributed to the Hoyle story, even if indirectly. 

 

 

There is a story that goes with another item I got from the Ricky Jay sale. Years ago, I purchased a copy of the first edition of the Annals of Gaming (1775) in 2017, pictured here. The book reprints gaming essays from the periodical Covent Garden Magazine, discussed here. Many of the essays blatantly plagiarize Hoyle. There is a "second" edition (actually a reissue of the first edition with a reset title page) and in 2024 a dealer's catalogue offered a previously unrecorded "third" edition. I ordered the item as soon as I received the catalogue, but the item had been sold. It turns out that Ricky Jay had another copy, and that one I was able to purchase. It too is a reissue of the first edition with a reset title.  How odd that the book was unrecorded for 250 years, and two copies turn up in the trade just two years apart. 

Annals of Gaming
Levy [2220]

Hughes.1.1 (1824)
Levy [2231]

 

 

I would call the three books from the Jay sale "Hoyle adjacent" but there are some new Hoyles as well. This appears to be the only surviving copy of a cheap edition of Hoyle published by Thomas Hughes, reissued in 1825 and 1828. I particularly like the book because it has the original paper wrapper and a hand-colored frontispiece, pictured below. 

  

 

Wrapper and colored frontispiece
from Hughes.1.1

 

There were other Ricky Jay books--the sale had a lot of mixed lots so buying one book often meant buying a half dozen. Perhaps I'll write about some of the others, but for now I'd like to highlight something that came from another source. My obsession with piquet and with manuscripts continued with the item below. 

Manuscript in Italian
on the game of piquet 1800c
Levy [2217]

The handwriting is a bit awkward, but it is legible and bears no relationship to any printed work on piquet that I'm familiar with. It is 20 leaves and the gatherings have never been sewn or bound. 

The year 2026 is off to a slow start, but who knows what will turn up?