The Yellow Book

John Wisden was a small, fast bowler for Sussex who once took all ten wickets in an innings, every one of them clean bowled. He retired, went into the sports goods trade, and in 1864 published an almanack.

There has been one every year since. Through two world wars. The 1915 edition carried the obituary of W. G. Grace and the 1916 one carried a great many others.

What it is

The core of it is not opinion. It is the scorecard of every first-class match played in the preceding season, in full, with the bowling figures.

That is the point of Wisden. A game with a scorecard has an unusual property among sports: the record of a match is not a summary but a nearly complete account. Who batted, in what order, how many they made, who got them out, how many balls it took.

Publish that every year for a hundred and sixty years and you have not written a history of cricket. You have accumulated one.

The rest of the book — the notes by the editor, the essays, the Five Cricketers of the Year, which since 1889 can be awarded to a man only once in his life — sits on top of that spine.

The yellow

The dust jacket has been yellow since 1938, with a woodcut on the front of two cricketers in top hats, one bowling and one at the crease.

The woodcut is by Eric Ravilious, who is one of the finest English artists of the twentieth century and who was lost over Iceland in 1942 as a war artist. It has been on the front of the book, unchanged, for nearly ninety years.

The colour has become the identifier. A run of Wisdens on a shelf is instantly readable across a room, and complete runs are collected obsessively and priced accordingly.

The obituaries

Wisden’s obituaries section is long, it is unhurried, and its criteria for inclusion have always been generous to the point of eccentricity. The requirement is a connection to cricket. It has never much specified how strong.

So alongside the Test players and the county professionals and the long-serving groundsmen, you get schoolmasters, umpires, scorers, a man who once bowled at somebody famous in a net, benefactors, club secretaries of fifty years’ standing, and the occasional figure whose entire cricketing career appears to have been a single unremarkable afternoon.

The entries are written straight, in the same measured register as the ones for great players. A man who made nine runs in one first-class innings in 1931 gets his sentences.