The glory of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack
Does Wisden exist to be read? I only ask because it hadn’t struck me until I sat down to write this essay (or, perhaps, love letter) that I had not yet properly read my 2001 Wisden. I have fondled it, felt its impressive heft (1,648 pages), tucked a copy of the averages from the 2001 English season into it, but I haven’t actually read it. I bought it, of course, on the first day of that 2001 season — it always appears in early April as herald of a new cricketing year, the past eliding with the present in a way that exemplifies cricket’s continuities, its desire to will seamlessness (except on balls). I bought it and then put it next to the identical-looking volume from 2000 (a mere 1,600 pages, even though it had the onerous task of marking the passing of a cricketing century). And there it has sat since, barely consulted (now, let me think, how many runs did Baroda beat Bihar by in Super League Group B of the Ranji Trophy? … and who is that promising leg-spinner at Charterhouse?). No doubt I looked at the beautifully produced colour photographs, read the section on my beloved Glamorgan (“somewhat disappointing this season, the county nevertheless promises much next year” or some variant thereon), paused to note a rather uninspiring batch of “cricketers of the year”, but then slid it on to the shelf beside its predecessors, gleamingly yellow and endlessly reassuring. Wisden, you see, is not really for reading; it’s for collecting; it is less a book than a brick, and when people talk about building a collection, they really mean it. Wisdens do not merely furnish a room; a full set would enable you to build a sturdy shed.
Visit a cricket-loving man of a certain age and there they will be — shelf-fuls of squat, fat volumes (brown before dust-wrappers were introduced in 1965, yellow thereafter), arranged in date order, the great game encapsulated. Another question: do women collect Wisdens? There may be one or two, but they have the good sense to keep quiet about it. Almost invariably it is men who collect: stamps, train and plane numbers, second-hand books, first-hand Wisdens.
Perhaps this urge to collect is a throwback to the male’s early days as a hunter-gatherer. But I prefer a less flattering explanation, one that puts psychology before biology: in a disordered, emotionally dangerous world, a certain type of man — vulnerable, repressed, desirous of order and meaning — wants to inhabit a world of rigidly drawn borders, wants indeed to possess (itals) that world.
Wisden allows such possession: buy the 2001 volume and you possess the entire game for the previous year — the scores of every first-class match in every cricket-playing country, the date of birth and death of every notable cricketer, the laws of the game, all significant Test and first-class records. It gives you the world — a world that, despite the Hansie Cronje match-fixing affair, still makes sense. Buy the entire set — an uninterrupted run from 1864 — and you can possess the universe.
These days, however, emotional security does not come cheap. The inflationary point is usefully made by referring to an article on the history of Wisden published in the 1963 centenary edition of the almanack (note that all-important archaic “k”) by L.E.S Gutteridge (note, too, the initials — Wisden is a world of men with initials rather than first names). He points out that a complete set auctioned at Sotheby’s in 1937 fetched £33, that in 1954 a set went for £145, and that at the time of writing his centenary history a set in good condition would cost £250. I asked a bookseller friend what a set would sell for now, and he estimated £40,000 to £50,000, depending on its condition. He thought there were some 30 to 50 sets in private hands and that 400 to 500 people (mainly men with three initials) were actively collecting sets.
Even though I only have two initials, when resources admit I intend to join those determined collectors. I have dutifully bought every almanack since 1979 as they appeared and picked up a few others second-hand, but that barely constitutes a beginning. The post-war volumes are easy, even though they disappear from second-hand bookshops pretty smartly. This is the flat road; the hills begin before the second world war and then the peaks loom: the war-rationed volumes of 1915 and 1916 (the latter almost did not appear and, it is claimed, only came out because WG Grace had died in 1915 and “the champion” had to be given a fitting send-off); the extremely rare volume of 1875 when fewer than usual were printed; and the precious first Wisden of 1864, the cricketing equivalent of a Shakespeare first folio.
So difficult is it to get the first 15 Wisdens that they have been reprinted in facsimile. Of the £40,000-plus outlay for a set, more than half would go on acquiring originals of those 15, even assuming they came up for sale. But still the facsimiles would not really tempt me. I would want the original battered 1864 copy, with its secret history, and that 1875 rarity. I still, I hope, have half a lifetime left for the quest. Wisden is frequently referred to as the “cricketer’s bible”, but it is more holy grail: acquiring the set promises to let you in on some secret, admits you to some cricketing elect. Or so it seems to we believers. Life, the universe and everything — though the answer is not 42, but 139, the number of the 2002 almanack.
Gutteridge’s brief but admirable survey of the history of Wisden (a subject surely meriting book-length treatment) makes clear the competition it had in the first 30 years from other annuals and almanacs. John Wisden himself (known as the “Little Wonder” in his playing days) was a fast off-break bowler who once took 10 wickets in an innings, all clean-bowled. He owned a sports equipment shop near Leicester Square and started the almanack in the year after he retired from the game, principally to advertise his sports goods. The first volume ran to 112 pages and, as Gutteridge remarks, “contained a good deal of delightful, but quite extraneous, matter — such as the rules of knur and spell, a brief history of China, the rules for playing the game of bowls, the winners of the Derby, Oaks and St Leger, and sundry other ‘discrete’ information on canals, British societies, the Wars of the Roses, and coinage”. All this for one shilling — the price at which it was sold until 1915! No wonder it was such a success.
John Wisden died, aged 57, in 1884, but his company went on publishing it until 1937, when the ravages of the Depression forced it to sell out to Whitakers. In 1979, they sold it to Macdonald, which was owned by Robert Maxwell, who threatened to remodel it along the lines of the Rothmans sports annuals, doubtless losing all its subtleties and eccentricities along the way. The men with initials fought a successful rearguard action and wrested it from Maxwell, who in any case much preferred soccer to cricket, re-establishing the imprint of John Wisden & Co. Since 1993 it has been published under the benign patronage of the cricket-loving millionaire philanthropist Paul Getty.
Wisden today is not merely an institution but, dread word, a brand. As well as the almanack, there is a magazine (Wisden Cricket Monthly), the inevitable website (www.wisden.com), an Australian version (in baggy-cap green rather than yellow) and several spin-off books, the most useful of which is the series of complete Test match scorecards in chronological order. But the almanack remains the core, and perish the thought of another financial crisis to endanger it or another Maxwell anxious to turn it into something else. There have been 14 editors in its near-140 year history, with two of them — Sydney Pardon from 1891-1925 and Norman Preston from 1952-1980 — managing more than 60 years between them. That continuity has been at the heart of Wisden’s success: it has changed when it had too (new owners Whitaker’s restructured the book to make it more user-friendly in 1938 and editor Matthew Engel dusted away some of the reactionary cobwebs when he became editor in 1993), but each volume is recognisably part of the series. The reader of 1864 would not be too startled by the 2001 edition, even if he was inconvenienced by the bulk and distressed by the price (£29.99).
Gutteridge’s account of Wisden’s first 100 years ends with an anecdote about a Yorkshireman called K.A.Auty, who spent most of his life in the US, where he resided with a large collection of cricketana. “He kept his complete set of Wisden under his bed,” writes Gutteridge. “He could then, having made himself properly comfortable, forget his maturing bills and overdue argosies, dip down and take at random any volume that came to hand. He was often found perusing the same volume hours later.”
After finishing Gutteridge’s article, I skipped 300 pages or so to look at how Glamorgan had fared in the 1962 season. I read through the scores of their home games, which are printed sequentially, and became interested in a match played against Middlesex at Newport (my home town and, sadly, no longer a venue for Glamorgan matches) in July: a dull draw, but who is this R.A.Gale who scored 200 for Middlesex?
The Middlesex section is unforthcoming: an opening batsman, clearly, who enjoyed a reasonable season (he averaged 38.14) and was good enough to keep the 20-year-old Mike Brearley out of the team. Oh, and he was born in Old Warden, Bedfordshire on 10 December 1933. But what happened to him, did he ever make another double-hundred, and how quickly did the England captain-to-be Brearley supersede him as opening bat? I don’t have the volumes from the mid-60s and now urgently need them to tie up these loose ends. My quick glance at the Glamorgan results has, in a moment, transported me to the struggles of 40 years ago. Like Auty, a cricket-mad Yorkshireman in a foreign land, I am back in a world I love and can understand, where past and present exist on terms of easy intimacy and mutual regard. I may be there some time.
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