You Could Look It Up (38 page)

The book was a prompt success, and it encouraged him to tinker with the text. A second edition was called for within a few months, and while the first edition had omitted Hoyle’s name, identifying its author simply as “a gentleman,” this one bore “
By
EDMUND HOYLE
,
Gent.
” on the title page. The following year, 1743, saw an amazing eight new editions, including a pirated one from Dublin. People clearly wanted Hoyle’s wisdom without his extravagant price tag. Within a few years,
pirated editions would outnumber the authorized London printings. Hoyle, aware that he could never compete with the pirated editions if he continued charging a premium, released his second for just two shillings a copy.

Hoyle soon began branching out into other games. After
A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist
in 1742 came
A Short Treatise on the Game of Back-Gammon
in 1743, and two works—
A Short Treatise on the Game of Quadrille
and
A Short Treatise on the Game of Piquet … To Which Are Added, Some Rules and Observations for Playing Well at Chess
—in 1744. These guides soon came together in one volume, as with
The Accurate Gamester’s Companion: Containing Infallible Rules for Playing the Game of Whist … Also the Laws of the Game … to Which Are Added, the Games of Quadrille, Piquet, Chess and Back-gammon, … Likewise a Dictionary for Whist, and an Artificial Memory
, published in 1748, or
Mr. Hoyle’s Games of Whist, Quadrille, Piquet, Chess, and Back-Gammon, Complete, in Which Are Contained, the Method of Playing and Betting, at Those Games … Including Also, the Laws of the Several Games
, published around 1755.

The early editions were not much interested in official rules. Hoyle’s Piquet book, for instance, includes a section on chess that nowhere explains how the pieces move. But later editions gave more attention to the rudiments:

The Chess-Board contains sixty-four Squares.

The King and his Officers, being eight Pieces, are placed upon the first Line of the Board, the white Corner of it being towards your Right-hand.

The white King must be upon the fourth black Square. The black King upon the fourth white Square: Opposite to each other.
3

Hoyle aspired to teach players not merely the rules but the strategies behind them, and that meant teaching them some principles of probability and statistics. Both of these branches of mathematics were still in their infancy, and if even the professional mathematicians were largely ignorant of probabilities, laymen were completely in the dark. Hoyle therefore worked to introduce the amazing power of combinations:

First Quere
, How many Chances are there upon six Dice?

The thought of probability turned his attention to less frivolous topics, like mortality. In a curious digression he prints a “Breslaw Table”—the name comes from such tables’ early use in Breslau, now Wroc
ł
aw, Poland—giving estimates of the proportion of people who can be expected to live to each age. Of every thousand infants born, 855 were expected to live into their second year, 680 to survive to the age of eight, 531 to be alive at thirty, and just 20 of the original thousand to live to age eighty-four.
5
Such a table served more than morbid curiosity: the new insurance industry was keen to know the likelihood of various disasters. “Suppose it was required to know the Odds of a Man of 25 Years of Age, dies within a Year?” Hoyle mused:

Look in the Table and you will find in the Column against 25, that there is alive 567; in the following Year,
viz.
26, there is only 560 living; therefore it is 560 to 7, that a Person of twenty-five Years of Age lives one Year. Or when reduced, 80 to 1.
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Or, more ghoulish still,

If you would know how many Years a Man of forty has an equal Chance to live, look in the Table against 40, and you will find alive then 445; then look in the Table till you come to half that Number,
viz.
222, which shews that is nearly an equal Wager that a Man of forty Years of Age, lives twenty-two Years.
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Hoyle’s great achievement was to become not merely one gaming commentator among many, but the quasiofficial arbiter of how games are played. By collecting all the rules in one place, Hoyle turned an instruction book into a reference book. His was no longer a book to be read through before play began: instead, it was a book people turned to when they needed to settle arguments.

Keeping all the editions, expansions, abridgments, adaptations, and translations straight is a bibliographical nightmare, and not merely in England: Hoyle’s work crossed the English Channel in 1763, when it was published in France as
Le Jeu de whist de M. Hoyle
. The proliferation of “Hoyles” caused problems—for Hoyle, of course, since he was not earning any money from the unauthorized copies, but also for his readers, since the whole point of having a book to settle disputes is to have a single, unimpeachable authority. Hoyle and his publishers began by putting notices on title pages to indicate the book was “Authoriz’d as revis’d and corrected under his [E. Hoyle’s] own hand.”
8
That formula proved insufficient, so beginning in 1743, he began warning them away from the competition: “The author has thought proper to inform the publick, that no copies of these books are genuine, but such as are signed by him.”
9
(The books were far too popular for him to sign every copy; the publisher made do with a woodcut of his signature.)

Hoyle was impressively long-lived: he died in 1769, in his late nineties, beating the odds that appeared in his own tables. And though he published prolifically during his lifetime, his productivity only increased after his death. In 1775, for instance, Charles Jones published
Hoyle’s Games Improved
, a work of 228 pages that went through multiple editions. In 1860 an
American Hoyle
appeared, and in 1887
The Standard Hoyle, a Complete Guide upon All Games of Chance
. Some editions got smaller:
An Epitome of Hoyle, with Beaufort and Jones’s Hoyle Improved; or, Practical Treatises
appeared around 1783, the word
epitome
in the title tipping off potential buyers that this was an abridgment. Even though it spelled out the rules and offered betting advice on thirteen separate games, from backgammon to tennis, it filled just 87 pages.

Hoyle quickly became a byword. He was famous enough to inspire an anonymous wag to publish
The Humours of Whist: A Dramatic Satire
in 1743, which took a few digs at Hoyle, such as insisting that “The genuine Books published by the Author, will be all signed with his Name.”
10
Other literature of the day reveals Hoyle’s place in high society. In
Tom Jones
(1748), Henry Fielding sketched a portrait of a young man about town who was scandalized to find four guests playing cards, and “my
Hoyle
, Sir,—my best
Hoyle
, which cost me a Guinea, lying open on the Table, with a Quantity of Porter spilt on one of the most material
Leaves of the whole Book.”
11
In 1750, Samuel Johnson’s
Rambler
series published a letter supposedly by the airheaded “daughter of a man of great fortune,” who boasted, “Mr. Hoyle, when he had not given me above forty lessons, said I was one of his best scholars.”
12

By 1786, people were using the phrase “according to Hoyle” to mean “in accordance with the rules of games.”
13
By the second decade of the nineteenth century, the expression had broadened its application further: it was now “in accordance with the rules,” not only of card games, but of games of the heart. A novel from 1818, for instance, refers to a colonel who has “the stupidity to
boast
of non-payment” of his debts, “which is not thought exactly, according to Hoyle, in the
love
game.”
14
Another novel describes the “ceremony” of kissing one’s love letters, “which, in love affairs, is … according to
Hoyle
.”
15
By the 1830s, a writer could explain that Hoyle’s “name has become so familiar, as to be immortalised in the well-known proverb, ‘According to Hoyle.’ ”
16
By the time the short story writer O. Henry used it in 1906—“The financial loss of a dollar sixty-five, all so far fulfilled according to Hoyle”—Hoyle had joined the very small number of reference-book writers whose personal names became synonymous with the authority embodied in their books: in the English-speaking world, only Johnson, Webster, and Roget enjoy a similar name recognition.

Though the Hoyle franchise eventually published guides to cricket (“The Ball must weigh not less than five Ounces and a Half, nor more than five Ounces and three Quarters”), tennis (“A Tennis Court is usually ninety-six or seven Feet long, by thirty-three or four in Breadth”), and so on,
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most of Hoyle’s attention was on the baize and the game board. But one book devoted entirely to an outdoor game became so successful that it became a brand name to rival Hoyle’s.

Rheumatism forced John Wisden, a popular Victorian cricketer, to end his sporting career at the age of thirty-seven, and an impressive career it was. Wisden was born in Brighton in 1826 and, though he lacked the height that many players hoped for, he was an impressive underarm bowler. He went on to play not only for Sussex (82 matches, 578 wickets) but also for Kent and Middlesex. In one legendary match,
he bowled all ten wickets in the second innings of the South v. North game on July 15, 1850. No one had ever done it before, and in the more than 165 years since, no one has done it again.

After his unexpected retirement in 1863, he founded John Wisden & Co. in a shop near Leicester Square, and from that location he ran a world empire of sports publishing, turning his attention to a publication that collected facts and figures about the sport he loved. He was not the first;
The Guide to Cricketers
, edited by a former associate of Wisden’s, had been appearing annually since 1849. And Wisden’s own first edition, published in 112 cramped pages, was undistinguished when it appeared in March 1864. Robert Winder, the historian of
Wisden
, has called the first edition little more than a “clump of scorecards.”
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Although the preface explained that “we have taken great pains to collect a certain amount of information,” it was apparently cobbled together in a rush. It included only rules (“No umpires shall be allowed to bet”) and scores, but no commentary: “We, of course, make no comments upon the matches, leaving the cricketer to form his own opinion with regard to the merits of the men, since a great many of our readers are at least equal, if not superior, to ourselves in arriving at a right judgement of the play.”
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The first edition was not even limited to cricket. There are rules of other games—for instance, the rules of quoiting—and even miscellaneous reference information such as the dates of the English Civil War, the lengths of England’s canals, and the dates of the Crusades was included. Gideon Haigh, the chronicler of Wisden’s enterprises, describes this first edition as “a messy book, its scores surrounded with such factual bric-a-brac as winners of the Derby, Oaks at St Leger, a potted history of China, and the rules of pastimes like Knur and Spell,” which “seemed destined for a short life.”
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And yet, despite the unpromising beginning, its publication has been regarded as an epoch in the sporting world: “1864 should rank as the dawn of cricket,” Haigh argues. “The publication of the first edition of
Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack
was more than the minting of a distinguished imprint; it manifested the emergence of a record-keeping instinct in the game, now taken for granted, but intrinsic to its senses of continuity and context. The idea of records was a precondition for modern sport.”
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