2016: The Year in Collecting

Earlier this year, the Book Club of California hosted the annual tour of the Fellowship of American Bibliophilic Societies. I was a panelist for a session entitled "Delights and Dilemmas of Booksellers, Librarians, and Private Collectors."  The dilemma I discussed is one familiar to the long-time collector--I don't find much to buy in my area of interest. The upside is that when I do find something, it's quite delightful. There is a video archive of the discussion on the BCC web site.

With that thought, 2016 was, like 2013, 2014, and 2015, a pretty quiet year in collecting. I've already written about the most interesting books, the Scottish miniature in a slip case and the early English book with the rules of piquet. I have four items to discuss here and will treat them in the order published.

The New Pocket Hoyle (1807)
Levy [1813]

The oldest is a third edition of The New Pocket Hoyle printed by T. Davison for Robert Scholey and others, 1807. Like the first edition, discussed in my essay "Late Hoyles, Early Slipcases", the book was sold in multiple formats, this one in a slip case covered with an engraving dated 1805. It's hard to be 100% sure, but I believe the engraving is identical to the one dated 1802 used in the first edition--the engraver appears to have changed only the date. You can judge for yourself by comparing the picture at right with that in the earlier essay. The New Pocket Hoyle is a relatively common book and was priced accordingly, but it is delightful to find it in a well-preserved case.

Early American Hoyles are much less common. I found the shabby copy of Hoyle's Games pictured below on eBay. It is printed and sold by John Bioren in Philadelphia in 1817. There is a crude tape repair to the spine, but the printed paper covered board has somehow survived. There are only three known copies of this book and I'm only a bit embarrassed to say that I have two of them. Yes, this was a duplicate; perhaps one of my copies will make it to the American Antiquarian Society at some point. They try to collect every early American imprint and tend to be active on eBay. I don't know how they missed this one.

Hoyle's Games, Philadelphia (1817)

Hoyle's Card Games, Glasgow (1826)
Levy [1816]

Astonishingly, I found another delight on eBay. This is a Glasgow imprint of Hoyle's Card Games (1826). The text is the same as the Bath edition of 1824, and I was aware of an 1827 Glasgow edition with copies at Oxford and Louisiana State (in the poker and Hoyle collection of Judge Olivier P. Carriere). The 1826 Glasgow edition was not known anywhere. Alas the book is imperfect, lacking two leaves at the end, but it seems to be the only survival, so I can't much complain.

Gazzetta.Whist.It.1832
Levy [1808]

Finally, a travel story. My family visited Italy and Spain in the Spring. Had I been alone I would have attended the international book fair in Bologna and visited a number of fine book shops in Italy and Madrid. I had different priorities with my family but was pleased to happen upon a shop in Sienna. There I found two gaming books, one of which was a delight. It consisted of four pamphlets in Italian bound together: two on chess, one on the card game of calabrasella, and the last...Hoyle's rules for whist compiled by "Bob Short".

 

As regular readers may recall, Bob Short is a pseudonym for Robert Withy, about whom I've written frequently. His short rules for whist date to the late 18th century and were reprinted frequently in the first half of the 19th. This Italian edition of 1832 purports to be a third edition. I've tracked down a Florence edition of 1820 which seems to be the earliest, but no sign of a second edition.

Most rare book purchases are online these days. It's a delight to walk into a shop at random and find something that fits so well into my collection. I definitely miss the days when that happened much more frequently!

2013: The Year in Collecting

As the year draws to a close, I thought I'd take a quick break from bibliography and book history to look at my year in collecting. I'm at the point where it is difficult to find good Hoyle material that I do not already have. I recently wrote to a friend that I'm happy if I can find a dozen new items a year. This year the number was eight, and it was so high only because I have started to collect more seriously into the early 19th century for reasons I discuss in the essay "Continuities and Disruptions."

The one new eighteenth century item was a copy of the Polite Gamester printed in Dublin for Peter Wilson in 1752. I discuss the book in "A Copyright Fight in Dublin," noting that there are two issues of the book, one with 38 pages on whist and the other with 46. It is clear that the extra four leaves were added later to compete against the Ewing Polite Gamester of the same year. I now own a copy of the earlier issue, one of only two recorded.

I have written much about Hoyle's Games Improved edited by Charles Jones and records of its publication in the Longman Archive. One of the many interesting features of these books is that occasionally excerpts of them would be issued separately. For example in 1800 a section on game cocks was issued as a separate title. I'll discuss another example on horse racing below.

A number of times the chapters on card games were issued as Hoyle's Games Improved and Selected as a Companion to the Card Table. I discussed an 1803 edition in "Late Hoyles, Early Slip Case." I managed to find an 1813 edition in fine condition, still in its slip case, on eBay, of all places. Interestingly, the 1813 Companion is excerpted from the 1814 Jones Hoyle, both of which were published on December 24, 1813.

I found some lovely early 19th century translations this year. I previously wrote about the first Dutch edition of 1790. I now have the second edition of 1810, pictured below. What is striking is the folding table setting out the scoring rules for the game of quadrille in letterpress.

Whist.Nl.2.1
Levy [1775]

1810 Amsterdam
Letterpress folding plate

I noted earlier that Hoyle was first translated into Portuguese, and showed the second and third editions of 1768 and 1784. Now that I am moving into the 18th century, I found copies of the fourth and fifth editions, dated 1818 and 1827 respectively. The text appears unchanged.

Whist.Pt.5
Levy [1777]

Whist.Pt.4
Levy [1776]

Card.1
Levy [1771]

The book pictured at left is unusual and interesting. It is a small book with a text block of 10.7 x 6.7 cms. My copy has two identical engraved title pages (the second certainly an accident) with the title Hoyle's Games. The Bath Edition. The engraving includes the Ace of Spades from a deck by Hunt and Sons as illustrated here.


The letterpress title page reads Hoyle's Card Games, Complete; with an Appendix Containing his Guide to the Turf. The work is dated 1824 and is printed for E. Barret whom I believe was in Bath, and sold by three London booksellers, Bumpus, Crawford, Clark. Interestingly Bumpus was to be on the imprint for the main line of Hoyles from 1826 to 1868. Perhaps he was getting his feet wet selling this Bath edition. 

It is the Guide to the Turf which I find most interesting. The phrasing of the title is interesting, suggesting that the Guide is Hoyle's, but of course he never wrote about horse racing. Instead, some racing material was added to the 1814 edition of Hoyle's Games Improved, edited by Charles Jones. Like the Companion to the Card Table I discuss above, the racing material was separately issued as A Guide to the Turf. And it is that material that appears in the Bath edition.

The book seems rare, with other copies only at the Bodleian and UNLV. Even rarer is the 1814 Guide to the Turf. The Longman Archives show that 2000 copies were printed, but only one copy survives, at the library of a veterinary school in Hanover Germany. The 1824 Bath edition was reprinted in Glasgow in 1827 (Card.3) in an identical small format, though apparently without the engraved title. The only surviving copy is part of the Carriere Collection of Poker and Hoyle at Lousiana State University.

In the essay "Bob Short's Short Rules for Short Memories", I discuss the difficulty of identify all the many chapbook editions of Hoyle edited by Robert Withy under the pseudonym Bob Short. That essay noted a New York edition of 1828. I managed to find a copy of it this year--it seems to be the first United States printing of Bob Short.

Bartlett.Whist.1828
Levy [1773]

1828 New York (title)

 

I've left out the most interesting 2013 acquisition and will save it for the next essay.

Serendipity at the Library

In my essay "A Research Trip to Cleveland," I wrote about two Hoyles I saw in the White Collection that were gathered in nines. I quoted Fredson Bowers from his Principles of Bibliographical Description:

There do exist, however, a very few extraordinary books for which it would be acceptable to use odd index numbers when the odd leaves indicate a consistent method of printing a whole book and not simply of an isolated gathering...Jacob Blanck in a recent article on Washington Irving's Salmagundi pamphlets (1807-1808), which often exhibit the initial gathering in 9's and even in 11's, refers to several early nineteenth-centruy books regularly gathered in 9's. (page 228-9)

Today I went to the San Francisco Public Library to read the Blanck article, "Salmagundi and its Publishers" in Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, Volume 41, First Quarter 1947, pp1-32.

Salmagundi is a periodical written by Washington Irving, his brother William, and James Kirke Paulding. It was issued in 20 parts in 1807 and 1808. The Blanck article describes each part according to the (pre-Bowers) bibliographical standards of the day and provides an interesting overview of the publisher, David Longworth of New York. Blanck details a number of Longworth's eccentricities, such as puffing his own business in city directories he published in the early 19th century and habitually not capitalizing "new-york."

As to the nine-leaf gatherings, Black notes:

Another of Longworth's eccentricities becomes evident when one collates Salmagundi and discovers the existence of many gatherings in nine, and one in eleven, the full significance of which can be appreciated only by a printer.^6a 

The footnote continues:

^6aBooks in nine are so infrequent that other examples may be of interest. Longworth was responsible for at least one other: Willia Dunlap's Ribbemont, Or The Feudal Baron, A Tragedy in Five Acts..., New-York. Printed And Published by D. Longworth...1803; this collates: [A]-D⁹. Longworth had no monopoly and this peculiar for of book-making. Another example is Joe Miller's Jests...A New Edition, London: Printed [by T. Kaygill, Strand] For Duncombe...[n. d., ca, 1810]. The "Jest Book," a bibliographical jest indeed, collates: [A]¹, B-H⁹, I⁸.

And the serendipity? The publisher David Longworth is quite familiar to me. He published the second edition of Hoyle in America, Longworth.1, a book I describe in "The New Pocket Hoyle, New York, 1803." The Blanck article made me wonder whether Longworth's New Pocket Hoyle might be gathered in nines--I had never collated it.

I came home to examine my copy and found it was gathered in eights, with a prosaic collation of A-G⁸. I must say, I was a bit disappointed! But it was amusing to seek out the PBSA article for a footnote and be entertained by the entire article!

The New Pocket Hoyle, New York, 1803

I just came across an interesting newspaper advertisement from the Chronicle Express in New York, dated January 2, 1804:

District of New-York,
Be it remembered that on the fifteenth day of June in the twenty-seventh year of the Independence of the United States of America, David Longworth of the said district, hath deposited in this office the title of a book the right whereof he claims as proprietor, in the words following, viz.

THE POCKET HOYLE Containing the Games of

Whist,            |  Cribbage,
Quadrille,          |  Matrimony,
Piquet,        |  Cassino,
Quinze,          |  Reversis,
Vingt-un, |  Put,      
Lansquenet,       |  Connexions,
Pharo,             |  All Fours,
Rouge et noir,    |  Speculation. 

To which is added
The Games of Brag and Chess.

With the practice and rules as established and practiced by the correctest players.

In conformity to the act of the Congress of the United States, entitled "An act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies during the time therein mentioned."

Edward Dunscomb,

Clerk of the District of New-York.

Dec 27.

What book does the advertisement refer to? How could Hoyle, who died in 1769, have a newly copyrighted work in New York in 1803?

Longworth.1
Levy [1759]

The book is not difficult to identify. I discuss the early American editions of Hoyle in "More Hoyle Collectibles," where I note that Longworth published the second American edition of Hoyle. The first was a 1796 reprint of the Hoyle edited by James Beaufort, issued in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston. The Longworth edition, pictured at right, is quite rare, with the only recorded institutional copy at the Library Company of Philadelphia. Astonishingly, the American Antiquarian Society lacks a copy.

It is a charming book. It truly is pocket sized, 4 1/4" by 2 5/8", and with 13 lines of type per inch, it is difficult to read without a magnifying glass. The binding is decorated red leather, though my copy is a bit shabby and lacks the front board entirely. For such a rare survival, I can't complain too much about condition!

Pocket Hoyle, spine and rear board

Where did the text come from? That, too, is easy to identify. The book is a word-for-word reprinting of The New Pocket Hoyle...Accurately Displaying the Rules and Practice, as Admitted and Established by the First Players in the Kingdom. London: Printed by T. Bensley for Wynne and Scholey, and Wallis. 1802, a book I discuss in "Late Hoyles, Early Slipcases." The book has a lovely engraved title page in addition to that in letterpress. 

Pocket.1
Engraved title page
Levy [1728]

Pocket.1
Letterpress title page

 

There are some minor changes in the title page between the British and American editions: "New Pocket Hoyle" is replaced by "Pocket Hoyle", "First Players in the Kingdom" by "correctest players", and so on. The careful reader will note that the game of vingt-un (twenty-one) is listed only in the American edition. That is clearly an oversight by the printer Bensley, for the game does appear in both books after quinze and before lansquenet.

What is interesting is that copyright for The New Pocket Hoyle was one of three copyrights in Hoyle traded among the London booksellers at the trade sales. See the essay "More on the Hoyle Copyright." Though much of the contents were in the public domain by 1802, the work was deemed worthy of copyright protection by the London trade. So the text was under separate copyright in the United States and in England. It would be interesting to know if there were any contractual relationship between the London and American publishers, but that seems unlikely. Undoubtedly a copy of the book made it from London to New York where David Longworth reprinted the work and registered the copyright.

It is odd that the same literary work had different owners in London and America, particularly as many London booksellers had distribution arrangements in the States. The situation is a consequence of the lack of international copyright. Ireland, of course, provides another example of multiple ownership of the same work, as English copyright law did not extend to Ireland until the 1800 Act of Union. I have frequently discussed Irish reprints of Hoyles (principally in "Early Dublin Editions of Hoyle", "Individual Treatises in Ireland"  and "The Polite Gamester") where custom rather than law protected copyright. I noted an instance where custom broke down in "A Copyright Fight in Dublin?"

I mentioned that Longworth edition of Hoyle is the second to appear in America; the first, the reprint of the Beaufort Hoyle, was apparently not copyrighted. So, this small, rare, and charming books is the first Hoyle to be protected by copyright law in the United States.

More Hoyle Collectibles

This essay continues the discussion from recent essays, looking at Hoyle and whist collectibles.

The first is an early American letter from Samuel Smith to his brother Edwin, dated September 20, 1810. The Smith family of Wiscasset, Maine produced several prominent Maine lawyers and one governor. What is interesting for our purposes is the line:

Wish you to bring on with you a little book of mine which I lent to you some time since, called "Hoyles Games", which I very much want, to perfect myself in the Game of Chess one of the games contained in the volume—it can be of no service to any one at our house

Smith letter p1
Levy [0158]

Smith letter p2

To get a little bibliography into this essay, let's ask what edition of Hoyle Smith might have owned. The first gaming book to be published in American was Hoyle's Games Improved, edited by James Beaufort. It was a reprint of a London edition first appearing in 1775, after the Hoyle entered the public domain (as discussed here). The the second and final London edition appeared in 1788. The book was printed in the United States in 1796 and was issued in three cities, Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. The imprints are:

• Boston : Printed and sold by William Spotswood, 1796
• New York : Printed for and sold by William Prichard; sold also by Prichard and Davidson, Richmond, 1796.
• Philadelphia : Printed for and sold by H. and P. Rice, no. 50 Market Street. Sold also by James Rice and Co. Market Street, Baltimore, 1796.

The language is likely significant. The Boston edition was "printed and sold" by Spotswood, while the others were "printed for and sold by" the other booksellers. I would expect the Boston edition to be the original, with cancel titles appearing on the New York and Philadelphia reissues. I will need to visit the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester which is the only institution with copies of all three. To note another possibility, one sometimes sees the imprint "printed, and sold by" with the comma suggesting that someone other than the bookseller printed the book. Sometimes even without the comma, the book was printed by an anonymous printer. More research is required!

Other American editions which preceded the 1810 letter include:

• The Pocket Hoyle. New York: David Longworth, 1803
• The New Pocket Hoyle. Philadelphia: H. Maxwell, 1805
• Hoyle's Games Improved. Boston: Edward Cotton, 1814
  
• Hoyle's Games Improved. New York: G. and R. Waite, 1816

Of course Smith may have owned a London edition—they were certainly imported to the United States. The earliest newspaper advertisement I have found is in the Pennsylvania Gazette of December 22, 1747 which notes "Also lately imported, and to be sold by B. Franklin, the following books, viz...[long list of books ending with] Hoyle on Whist."

I have discussed scoring tokens for whist in an earlier essay and also discussed the third important English book on whist, Advice to the Young Whist Player by Thomas Matthews (often spelled Mathews), first published in 1804. About 1818, the Birmingham metal smith Edward Thomason made a set of 24 tokens each with a quotation from the book. As one would expect, most of the tokens present suggestions for the game at whist. The one pictured below is of a different sort.

Mathews token obverse

Mathews token reverse

Advice went through more than two dozen editions, most of which I haven't seen. While the quotation does not appear on page 47 of any that I have, it does appear in the book in a section challenging one of the most basic of Hoyle's principals—to begin with one's longest suit. Matthews recommends leading the single card of a suit in some situations. This controversy among whist players persisted until well into the 20th century.

The quotation in greater context is:

As I have ventured to recommend occasional deviations from what is considered as one of the most classic maxims; i. e. the leading from single cards, without that strength in trumps hitherto judged indispensibly necessary to justify it; I give all the reasons that influence my opinion, in favor of this practice...And I appeal to those who are in the habit of attending whist tables, whether they do not frequently see the players, who proceed more exactly according to the maxims of Hoyle, &c. after losing the game, trying to demonstrate that this ought not to have happened, and that they have been vanquished by the bad, not good play of their adversaries. I do not recommend in general leading from single cards, unless very strong in trumps; but with such hands as I have mentioned, I am convinced it may be occasionally done with very great, though not certain advantage. It may not be unnecessary to inform the reader, that most of Hoyle's maxims were collected during what may be called the infancy of whist; and that he himself, so far from being able to teach the game, was not fit to sit down even with the third-rate players of the present day.

Finally, in the essay on whist tokens, I linked to an image of a set of tokens branded "Hoyle's Scoring Method." Here I offer images of a more pleasing set. The first images are the container for the four tokens.
 

Container bottom
Levy [0218]

Container top

One of the four identical tokens is pictured below. It is dated 1847 with Queen Victoria on the obverse and a seated lady at the card table on the reverse.

Token obverse

Token reverse

As discussed earlier, Hoyle had nothing to do with the scoring method that is not recorded until 1791, 22 years after his death. It is noteworthy, however, that Hoyle was a familiar brand from the first appearance of his books in the mid-18th century up to the present day.