Jon Hotten’s piece on collecting Wisden Almanacks originally appeared in the 2023 edition of Wisden Cricketer’s Almanack.
In May 2022, Chris Ridler drove from his home in a gold BMW with license plate WI5DEN and the words “www.wisdenauction.com – Start your collection today” on the hood. did. At an auction house from near Huddersfield in Leyburn, North Yorkshire to Tennant. He still couldn’t believe what he saw, but he hoped he was the only one who saw it. The book, map and manuscript auction includes what is described as a “complete edition” of the Wisden Cricketers Yearbook from 1864 to 2018, which also includes 17 facsimiles. What caught his eye was the extremely low price tag, which he estimated at between £2,000 and £3,000. Facsimiles are necessarily early editions, and even he includes his 1916 edition, which includes the obituaries of WG Grace and Victor his Trumper.
“There was a photo in the online catalog, and when I enlarged it, it looked like there were some original hardcovers,” Ridler said. “What you really want are the early hardcover books that didn’t hit the market until 1896. There’s a lot of money out there. Also, there are three reprints from 1890, 1891, and 1992. I thought that the hardcover from the late 10’s had been reprinted as well.I couldn’t see it in the photo, so I went and had a look. I was surprised to find out that there are some original hardbacks, two from the late 1890s, worth around £7,000 each. And his three cars from 1917 to 1919 combined can cost him over £9,000. ”
He looked around and wanted to see if he recognized another dealer. To his surprise and delight, he was the only other person to bid by phone. “We ended up paying about £13,000. I must have been in my late 20s. The guy behind me said, ‘I think I did pretty well there…’ ”
In the age of the Internet, old book coups are rare. The charity shop employs its own consultants and market prices for almost every book ever published are available at a click. In the small, isolated world of Wisden, men – and they are almost always men – spend half their lives searching for the perfect set, with the support of the most knowledgeable dealers and other enthusiasts. , nothing like this happens at all.
This yearbook was first published in 1864, loosely bound with a paper cover, and priced at one shilling. This lasted until 1896, when a cloth hardback edition was released, with covers varying between salmon pink, yellow and light brown, and priced at 2 shillings. In 1938, when Eric Ravilious’s woodcuts first appeared, softcovers became yellow linen. In 1965 Dust His Jacket was added to hardcover. A company called Willows makes a large number of facsimile machines, and a quick survey of the market reveals that some of them are reprints or have new spines or replaced pages. Since 1995, Wisden has produced leather bound editions of his limited editions of 150 copies. And that’s exactly what you need to collect. No one knows how many early editions still exist, how many complete editions exist in libraries or private collections, or what actually constitutes a true complete edition. I don’t understand. Do faxes count? And what about second editions? Or will the paperback be re-released as a hardcover?
Bill Farmage began his search in a library in Liverpool, where he first saw Wisden’s book and was fascinated by the name and number, even though he knew nothing about cricket. His friend was tempted to steal it for him by hiding it under the hood of his hoodie, but Bill knew that was wrong, especially when it came to this book.
“The first book I bought was the 1979 one, and I finished the set in 2006 after going to college, getting a job, and starting a family.” The one I needed the most was the 1869 paperback. And when I got it, I was like, “…” he hesitated, searching for the right words, “…disappointing,” he said, laughing, but summing up the nature of collecting. The thrill is in the hunt.
Like Ridler, who started collecting while working as a management consultant, Farmage gave up his (publishing) career to focus on yearbooks and is active through his website wisdenworld.com. Neither of them earn as much as they used to. Ridler estimates that two days of management consulting can earn him a month’s worth of profits at Wisden. But immersion in this mystical environment offers other benefits as well.
If you had bought a complete set for £750 in 1972, as composer Tim Rice did, your return on investment would have been much higher than if you had bought the average UK house for just over £6,000. It would have been. Today, the house is probably worth £286,000, and Housewifeis worth around £100,000. “Even considering the crazy inflation of the years since the purchase,” Sir Tim writes in the foreword to the Wisden Collector’s Guide, Relax quite a bit. “Investment”
As with residential construction managers, starting later is not without risks. Christopher Saunders started selling cricket books in 1978 from a shop in Wells, Somerset, and together with John McKenzie from Epsom he has become one of the country’s biggest experts in the market. He recognizes that Wisden‘s boom days are over, at least for now. “I bought a set that people used to buy for £250 in the 1960s. It’s obviously gone up. It went up significantly in the ’80s and ’90s and continued to go up until the financial crisis of 2008. Then, for some reason, trust waned, the internet boomed, people realized that most housewivess weren’t as rare as they thought, and prices went down.
“So 1864, which was at the top of the market in 2008, was 25 grants including envelopes and envelopes. Without it, it’s probably 15. Now, with the cover, it’s about 15 to 20. If you don’t have that, you’ll be lucky if you get seven. And as the generation that bought the sets in the ’60s passes away, more and more books come on the market. There are other sellers.” p>
The number of sets is naturally limited by the number of copies of the rarest vintage. No one knows exactly why, but this one dates from 1875. “It’s very rare for an original cover,” Saunders says. “I bought it from Christie’s for a client about two years ago and paid about £40,000 for it. Without the cover it would probably cost half that.” Mr Farmage said he has been keeping one specimen for almost three years. I passed the time without seeing it. Even if you find 1875, you’ll have to track down 1869, which is the next hardest year. According to Saunders, 1896 is also one of the more difficult of his early hardcover books. “We built a set like this for a customer about 15 years ago, and now we’re going to run into problems.”
JW McKenzie has long been a favorite among cricket book collectors, with barely-accessible shelves and narrow staircases crammed with books. As we sat in the tower room, Mackenzie, with a look of mischief and joy on her face, pulled out a notebook she would never sell. It’s a notebook he started writing more than half a century ago. He flipped to a page with a column in the left margin that began with “1864.” In a row next to each year, he marked each copy he saw. “If you look at the table, you can see which copies are the hardest to find. I was always looking for them. I cycled regularly every weekend from Hinchley Wood near Esher to the south coast, usually to Chichester or Brighton. There were bookstores everywhere, so I packed as much as I could carry. I had a little map with all the bookstores I could stop at. ”
Almanacs, historical or otherwise, are not always open about their editions, and many of their records were lost in air raids. The book also resists the urge to become too self-referential. The annual Kricketana section rarely includes theWiddencollection. And his only two articles about collecting are his 1963 LES Gutteridge and his 2013 Patrick Kidd. Mackenzie showed me Mr. Gutteridge’s article. He was the most knowledgeable cricket bookseller of his time, but strangely he did not mention that 1875 was particularly unusual. ”
The holy grail of knowing the true amount and the question of how much there is still remains. “The purest ones are original paperbacks from 1864 to 1895 with all original covers and spines,” Farmage says. There are no replacement pages. Completely original hardcover from 1896 to today. The 1965Wisden should have its original yellow dust jacket. As far as I know, 55 people currently have such devices. And every time I hear that someone has a detailed explanation or a change in binding or something like that, whether it’s told to me personally, or I’ve heard it from someone else, or in a newspaper or magazine, I’ll write it down. I believe there are 203 more complete original sets without facsimiles at this time. Some call it an 809 reading set that includes a fax machine, but any set is useful to have. ”
Saunders shares MacKenzie’s view that the market is too fragmented to get accurate numbers. “I know certain numbers from my customer base, and those numbers don’t seem to change much, because as soon as I finish building a set for someone, someone else dies and the set disbands. Until about 30 years ago, Mr. Wisden donated two copies each year to Buckingham Palace. It was previously believed that every district club had a set. That is no longer the case. For example, Glamorgan sold her company about 10 years ago. And many years ago it was said that every major city library had a library, but the last time I asked to see the library in Nottingham, the rare book was gone. Ta. And most sets break when sold at auction. It is almost impossible to sell a complete set at once. ”
I still have the thrill of finding an old book and carefully turning the pages as dry and fragile as autumn leaves. Mackenzie shows me upstairs to a room where I have a suitcase filled with original 1896 hardcovers. I am in awe of them and what they represent. What I have in my hands, at least through the plastic, is an 1879 paperback with a cover. I asked him if he had his 1875 model and he just smiled. And I wondered what it would be like to own this rare and rare thing, this little miracle, this portal into another, this lost time.
John Hotten is the author of seven books, includingJeffrey Boycott
