Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack is about to celebrate its 150th edition, and the Times has marked this with a special supplement (£). Quite right too. On such an occasion there should be bugles and bells; a symphony orchestra; choirs. How to convey to the non-cricket lover what a wealth is contained between those covers? As John Woodcock (aka the Sage of Longparish) attests, every devotee of the book has his or her inaugural edition (£):
The 1933 Wisden, the first I came to know off by heart, ran to 1,031 pages. Today it tops 1,500. Such was the hold the 1933 Wisden had over me that one of my school reports that year warned it was high time Hillard & Botting…, the primary Latin textbook, got more of a look-in.
Mine was the 1956 edition, two among its five ‘Cricketers of the Year’ my boyhood heroes – D.J. McGlew and H.J. Tayfield. But I also cannot hold back from mentioning the 1998 edition, in which, on page 1394, the then editor Matthew Engel wrote of Ashes ’97, the book I co-authored with my buddy Ian Holliday: ‘I have a curious feeling that this book will weather well as a social document of cricket-watching.’
If I were to say that being mentioned in Wisden realized an old dream of mine, it wouldn’t be the truth. Never at any point had I dreamed of making an appearance in this sacred volume. I am there now in perpetuity. Yes, I know, Ozymandias and all that; but bloody hell, Wisden.