Talking Cricket: Boundaries unknown in collectors' corner (21 July 1999)

21 July 1999

Talking Cricket: Boundaries unknown in collectors' corner

Tim Rice

In 1972, having a little spare cash about my person for the first time in my life, I made a serious investment of L750 - I purchased 109 sporting books, all but one out of print. Even though I was paying an average of a mere L6.88 per volume, my action was roundly criticised in The Sunday Times a week or two later as a ludicrous extravagance. Fortunately, I was not personally identified as the halfwit in question.

This was not the first time that particular organ had doubted my sanity, and it certainly wasn't the last. By and large, however, it has been the theatrical columns that have savaged me, not the sporting ones, but a quarter of a century on I have to say that the bloke who thought L750 was over the top for a complete set of Wisdens was even further out of his tree than the average Sunday Times theatre critic (the current one, of course, being a glorious exception - whoever he is).

In 1980, a complete set (admittedly once owned by Sir Pelham Warner) fetched L8,800. Plum's run was spotted doing the rounds a decade or so later, by which time the asking price was closer to L21,000. The leading cricket bookseller, J W McKenzie, says that a would-be purchaser must now expect to pay L30,000 for a full 1864-1999 run.

Sad to say, these full sets are now all but extinct in the marketplace. Sellers and auction houses have been known to break them up because selling copies in mini-runs or as individual items generally proves more profitable. Plenty of individual editions of Wisden have fetched far more than L750 since 1972. Last month, a single copy, of the first edition of all, that of 1864, sold for L6,500 at Phillips. Fling in the buyer's premium and the outlay for that one volume rises to L7,400. Even facsimile reprints of the 19th century editions have now acquired considerable value in their own right.

The vendor of that 1864 issue was doubly fortunate in that he only discovered his ownership of it as he flung a damp-affected box of junk from a house clearance into a skip. He had the foresight to retrieve what suddenly looked like a valuable old tome from the trash, but other stories of those early Wisdens do not make such happy reading. J W McKenzie is briefly a broken man when he speaks in hushed and halting tones of one particular incident in which the rarest items of a complete run were binned because they didn't look as smart as those of more recent years.

Readers of this column will know by heart Keats' great poem inspired by his first reading of Chapman's translation of Homer, the one that ends with the poet feeling:

. . . like stout Cortez when
with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific -
and all his men
Look'd at each other
with a wild surmise
Silent, upon a peak
in Darien.

Every cricket lover will know exactly how Keats felt, because that would have been precisely the feeling when he or she first opened a Wisden Cricketers' Almanack. Furthermore, they are one up on Keats in that Chapman never turned his winner into an annual event.

My own wild surmise came in 1954 when a fellow inky schoolboy named Michael Dunning allowed me to pore over his copy. For my birthday some months later I at last received my own copy, which set my parents back 12s 6d and me on to a lifetime's literary quest - I may own the lot but whether I shall ever read the lot is another matter.

There was another annual that cricket bibliophiles may recall; a venture that lasted for just six editions, from 1949 to 1954, expiring just as Wisden swam into my ken. This was The Boys' Book Of Cricket, edited by Patrick Pringle, who also came up with a Boys' Book of Soccer for the winter months, in the days when the seasons were distinct and spurious football tournaments did not interfere with the coverage of important cricket matches.

Mr Pringle's formula was uncomplicated but comprehensive. In common with Wisden, it reviewed the season just gone and contained much cricket history. It also featured articles by distinguished cricketers such as Douglas Jardine, Len Hutton, Trevor Bailey, R T Spooner . . .

Where Pringle may have actually been one up on Wisden was in his inclusion of some original cricket fiction - four short stories each year, well-told and anonymously delivered, generally emphasising the importance of fair play and side before self. It would be a marvellous innovation were the imaginative editor of Wisden today, Matthew Engel, to consider fiction -maybe not Andy At The Test or Mystery In The Pavilion, but where better to parade one new cricketing short story every year?

Those wishing to complete their run of The Boys' Book Of Cricket will not have to shell out quite as much as Wisden collectors. The 1950 and 1954 editions both went recently for L8.50, including postage and packing.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)