Author: HOYLE (Edmond):
Title: Hoyle's Games Improved and Selected as a Companion to the Card Table Consisting of Practical Treatises on Whist...[etc.] Wherein are Comprised Calculations for Betting upon Equal or Advantageous Terms.
Description: London Printed for A. R. Baldwin; W. Lowdes...[et al], 1808. 12mo (in 6s), 122 x 84 mms., pp. [iv], 166 [167 - 168 averts for Lowndes imprints], full-page illustration on page 128, original pink wrappers, contained in its original printed (but very darkened and soiled) slipcase; text foxed in places, some staining of pinks covers, and few other signs of minor, but generally a good to very good copy, though looking as if it was much-used by previous owners, one of apparently received this as a gift in 1826, "The Gift of/ Mrs motteboys [sic]/ 1826/ W. Jones" on the recto of the front free end-paper. Edmond Hoyle (1671/2 - 1769) began giving lessons on whist in the 1730s and published his Short Treatise on the Game of Whist in 1742, and many reprints followed. Charles Jones edited this volume and reconfigured it. Many reprints followed. Charles Jones edited this volume and reconfigured it. As the recipient of this presentation copy was an "W. Jones", this is most likely a family association copy. The noted commentator David Levy suggests that an edition of 1779 was textually important, in that it added new material on other games and allowed the publishers to create a new copyright. The slipcase containing this volume was one of the earliest of the revised Hoyles to be so issued; earlier examples appeared in 1803. This book's slipcase, as imitating an easy-access slipcase for a deck of cards, complete with thumb-accessible hemispheric notch in the middle of its top edge, is highly distinctive and notable, but to my knowledge has not actually been noted in any account of the history of British bookbinding that I have consulted. The British Library's online database of bookbindings does include a nineteenth-century edition of Hoyle, from two decades later, 1826, which is interestingly bound, but it is not bound as here, and has no slipcase. The BL database does include slipcases, nearly two dozen, but none that appear to imitate a playing-card sleeve as here. If anyone knows of an earlier exemplar of such a relevantly-turned and eminently-practical binding for a book about cards, answers on a postcard, please. I located copies of this printing in the Bodleian and in Cleveland Public library, though it is probably a re-issue of an early edition with a cancel title-page.

Keywords: gambling whist prose


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