Cricket's Historians

Chapter 17 The Booming Market for Cricket Books The 1980s saw commercial cricket books by mainstream publishers grow in number through the entire decade. In 1981 33 cricket books were readily available in U.K. bookshops, by 1989 that number had risen into the 80s. These figures do not include reprints, of which there were a considerable number and do not include, of course, local annuals or the works issued by the ACS, nor are overseas books included except in cases where those books could be easily obtained in the U.K. John Arlott continued to review all the titles submitted to Wisden and in the 1988 edition wrote: “The review, of 91 cricket titles, contains the largest number of outstanding contributions to the literature of the game issued in a single year. That is not reckoned since the beginning of this feature in Wisden , but through the history of cricket writing …. These publications embrace a number of quite unique contributions to writings on cricket, and the quality is uniformly high.” With hindsight it is difficult to agree with the final statement, for there were the usual clutch of ghosted autobiographies and ‘compendium’ works – 20 best batsmen, 50 great bowlers, 25 famous matches etc. – many of which were cobbled together to build up a publisher’s cricket list. The urge to publish also led to the duplication of two types of reference book. The first was a new style of ‘record’ book, breaking away from the Ashley-Cooper, Webber type with columns of statistics, providing lists 245