Cricket's Historians

248 The Booming Market for Cricket Books working not only to keep the site up-to-date, but also trying to reduce the number of errors in the scores which are held there. He was editor of The Cricket Statistician from 1988 to 2005. Apart from cricket, his other major interest is bridge. He has been chosen for England trials, having also represented Cambridge University and Kent. As was noted in Chapter 15, Padwick’s A Bibliography of Cricket was completed as a revised second edition in 1982, but was not actually published until 1984 and then in association with J.W.McKenzie, the leading secondhand cricket book dealer. The format was unaltered, Michael Pearce of the Cricket Society continued to be a major helper and Padwick also specially thanks Pat Mullins in Australia and S.S.Perera in Sri Lanka. With the most obvious aspects of cricket’s off-the-field interests now captured between book covers, those delving into the game’s past began to explore new aspects of research. Certain collectors had long been interested in cricket as illustrated in oil and water-colour. In 1941 a limited edition book had been published containing the paintings owned by Sir Jeremiah Colman. In 1955, the same publishers, Batsford, issued The Game of Cricket ‘illustrated by a series of pictures in the museum of the Marylebone Cricket Club, principally from the collection of the late Sir Jeremiah Colman’. There was an introductory essay by Sir Norman Birkett and notes on the 34 paintings are by the M.C.C. Librarian, Diana Rait Kerr. The book is a splendid first dip into the world of cricket pictures. The Noblest Game by John Arlott and Neville Cardus was published by Harrap in 1969, then reissued in 1989 by Bloomsbury with a new piece on cricket prints. There were 64 full-page colour illustrations, with descriptions of each on a facing page; the majority of the pictures are lithographs. In 1982 a more specialist volume of pictures was published. For a number of years collectors had sought out the full-page cartoons in colour, which had been published in the weekly magazine Vanity Fair . Indeed they had a popularity among collectors almost from the first edition in 1869 with