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.Games.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.Games.1824

 

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?  

 

2024: The Year in Collecting

I found some spectacular books this year: two Hoyles and a third book that is not obviously a Hoyle, but certainly belongs in my Hoyle collection. I'll also show some French and Dutch gaming literature, notable for its rarity. 

The best book of the year is a bit of a Frankenstein. It is a fifth edition of Hoyle's whist treatise printed for Francis Cogan (1744) but with a cancel title suggesting it is a "tenth" edition of Hoyle (1750). After the 76-page whist treatise are four pages, one unnumbered, the others numbered 78-80 containing the text of Hoyle's Artificial Memory for Whist. These four pages have never, never been recorded. After that is a second edition of Hoyle's Quadrille, printed in 1746. How did this book come to be the way it is? 

Thomas Osborne Jr. purchased the Hoyle copyright from Francis Cogan in later 1745. As I have discussed a number of times (here and here, for example), Osborne also acquired unsold copies of Piquet and Quadrille from Cogan and issued them with cancel title pages. My new acquisition shows that Osborne also acquired at least one unsold copy of Whist. He used the cancel section title for whist from the "tenth" edition of Mr. Hoyle's Games, which I have pictured here (about halfway down). His goal was to make an old text from 1744 appear fresh.

There was a catch. Osborne's sixth (1746) and seventh (1747) editions of Whist included Hoyle's Artificial Memory (I discuss Memory here and its incorporation into the whist treatise here). How could he sell the incomplete version of whist in 1750? Osborne had four new pages printed up containing the artificial memory: 

Artificial Memory for Whist
Levy [2199]

Notice how small the type is for Memory, so it can be squeezed into four pages. 

Before this book, I had never managed to find a copy of the fifth edition of Whist (described as Whist.5), so that was exciting. The late printing of Artificial Memory (described as Memory.2.*) was unknown, so that was even more so. The second edition of Quadrille, not so exciting, as I already had a number of copies.

You won't be surprised to learn that the dealer who sold me the book was not aware of all the bibliographical minutia. It was described as a tenth edition of Whist bound with a second of Quadrille. The dealer included a photograph similar to the one below to show the Quadrille title page. 

Memory page 80 and Quadrille title page

I knew that page 80 was something I had never seen before and bought the book not knowing exactly what it was. When I found the fifth edition of Cogan's Whist with an unknown printing of Memory, I was overjoyed with the purchase.

From 1775 to 1826, the best-selling Hoyle was Hoyle's Games Improved edited by Charles Jones, appearing in eleven editions. I bought a copy of the 1808 edition in 1997.

Jones, Hoyle's Games Improved (1808)
Levy [1149]

In addition to selling the complete book, the publishers arranged for four excerpts to be published separately, but with the same setting of type. I already had A Companion to the Card Table which was the first 168 pages of the 428 page book. It treated the games of whist through domino (which would not today be considered a card game). I also had a copy of a second extract, the material on chess. From newspaper advertisements, I was aware of an extract on backgammon, but no copies were known. I had seen a copy of a final extract on draughts (checkers) when I visited Cleveland Public Library. Somehow, copies of Backgammon and Draughts appeared on eBay and I was the high bidder.

Backgammon, excerpted from Jones (1808)
Levy [2208]

 

Draughts, excerpted from Jones (1808)
Levy [2207]

The draughts treatise was written by William Payne and Hoyle had nothing to do with it. Since it is an extract from Hoyle's Games Improved with the same setting of type, it definitely belongs in my Hoyle collection and Hoyle bibliography. It is pleasing for this completist Hoyle collector to have the full volume and all four extracts.

I seem to have gone a bit piquet happy this year. Piquet is one of the best cards game for two but this pamphlet pictured below describes piquet à écrire, a way to allow more than two to play. It was published by Jusseraud who was active in Paris in the first decade of the 19th century. The pamphlet is eight pages and had never been bound--there are two nested folded sheets, never trimmed. No other copies are known.

Piquet à Écrire (1810c)
Levy [2198]

The woodblock print is both charming and ironic. Why are the only two players when the pamphlet is about playing piquet with three or more?

My wife and I visited Bruges this year. What a charming city! Some people study guide books before traveling. Instead I bought a couple of books in Dutch on the game of piquet printed in Bruges. There are no recorded copies of the first in any library. The only copy of the second is at the Biekorf Main Library in Bruges. A couple of lovely rarities!

1765 Bruges imprint
Levy [2202]

1860 Bruges imprint
Levy [2203]

Last year, I bought a manuscript of a rare 1749 trictrac book, pictured here. This year, I found a second manuscript of the same book. The manuscript adds a tenth chapter “Renseignemens Supplémentaires,” an index of terms used in the text. 

Trictrac manuscript
Levy [2204]

There are a couple of interesting items coming to auction before year-end, so a part two may become necessary!