Agricultural History Review, Volume 68 Part 1 (2020), p. 128

In the 1920s the American sportsman and wealthy collector, Harry Worcester Smith visited Howell’s bookstore, Liverpool, before boarding his transatlantic liner to America. The best market for antique British sporting books, prints, periodicals, and the like was in the US, where Howell’s had over 800 customers eager to snap up their latest stock of rare publications. Keen to fill his new, fashionable Sportsman’s Library, Worcester Smith gleefully noted he ‘was not long in bargaining for all of these rarities, and whereas English collectors are the losers, the library at Lordvale is the gainer’ (Harry Worcester Smith Papers, National Sporting Library and Museum, Virginia, p. 324).

Notably, it was Americans who first recognized the value of Britain’s sporting heritage, and the American interest in British sporting ephemera remains dominant today. It is to an American, then, that we still turn for a new bibliography of British Sporting Journals. M. L. Biscotti, himself formerly an antiquarian bookseller, has previously done sterling service for historians of Field sports and American sports, by collating works such as Six centuries of foxhunting (2017), and American sporting periodicals: An annotated bibliography (2018). While previously there have been good bibliographic efforts by Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald (1946) and Anne Grimshaw (1982), it says something that many collectors still found they needed to refer to the sporting bibliographies of the private library of Charles Schwerdt (1862–1939) privately published in four volumes between 1928 and 1937 to obtain detailed periodical information.

Biscotti’s work then, is arguably one of the most important new listings of British Sporting Periodicals to date. His research into their publishing history and precise listing of where they may be found (both online and elsewhere) offers a truly valuable resource for locating this often obscure material. Useful sections on journal name changes and mergers also save much confusion for the researcher. Wide-ranging and detailed, his research captures previously little-known sporting journals for the first time. This is no easy task. Many early journals have largely been forgotten or ignored because their surviving run of issues are incomplete. As Paul Morgan argues in the foreword to Biscotti’s book, ‘periodicals – magazines, journals, newspapers – are ephemeral’, with the result that many were read, then discarded. Furthermore, because of their collective bulk, few complete series have been preserved by libraries or public repositories.

Arguably, Biscotti has had a distinct advantage over earlier bibliographers. The advent of the internet and digitization of primary books and periodicals on platforms such as Hathi Trust has made huge differences to our knowledge of what survives worldwide. Biscotti fully utilizes these new resources using everything from the impressive British sporting collections of the National Sporting Museum and Library in Middleburg, USA, to booksellers’ catalogues, and even eBay. Some periodicals such as Bailey’s Hunting Directory or the Badminton Magazine – two of the most popular sporting magazines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century – will be familiar to the reader, but other such as Field and Kennel (1902) survive in only one or two editions.

Biscotti has aimed his bibliography at the researcher or collector of vintage sporting periodicals. However, historians of more modern sports looking for journals of rugby, football and athletics etc., may be disappointed. As a consequence of Biscotti only including magazines that began publication before 1950, the works catalogued within are heavily weighted towards field sports, and publications originally largely printed for more wealthy sporting participants and their pastimes. Once common rural community sports such as Stoolball, Tipcat, and street football were rarely, if at all, featured in periodicals.

Considering the current British debates around field sports and cruelty, for some, the definition of ‘sport’ and the bibliographies’ bias towards field sports or ‘blood sports’ may be questioned, reflecting as it does the older forms of play. Yet, historians of the countryside, rural history, conservation, animal studies, and land management and legislation should welcome Biscotti’s diligence in capturing these ephemera into one readily accessible reference guide. These old periodicals and the articles, illustrations and even advertisements within offer much that is useful to understand the physical and material world and opinions of the sportsmen, larger sporting economy – the traders and shopkeepers who supplied the sportsmen and sporting resorts, and the often rural geographies of British sports and their participants. The wide spread of rural sporting periodicals covered and their frequent inclusion in periodicals linked with farming and land management should also satisfy the agricultural historian.

Indeed, while modern sport is increasingly urban-centric, with the benefits of this bibliography it is striking to see that the current idea of separation between the rural and urban is a relatively new development, with little distinction being made between the two in the earlier periodicals. Many of the periodicals were published in cities for elites who moved between town and countryside, and the rural exploits such as foxhunting, coursing and angling were given the greater weight and often combined with urban news about the theatre, latest fashions and pugilism. Not all periodicals have been included. Biscotti omitted the hundreds of lesser-known racing papers such as the Sporting Globe and Sporting Oracle, which have not survived apart from partial print runs in the British Library.

As he notes, Biscotti is unlikely to have exhausted the periodicals available, as some of these ephemeral publications are bound to exist in private hands or remain forgotten. While the compilation of these works must have involved a large amount of detective work, the rise of digitization may well uncover other period works that will require inclusion. Nonetheless, Biscotti has created an invaluable benchmark from which future findings may now be mapped and added.