Dining with the Wonder

The world's grandest, maddest, greatest sports book is launched once again – for the 163rd time

Tonight is the Wisden dinner, held in the fabled surroundings of the Long Room at Lord’s. It celebrates the publication of the Almanack, a book that has arrived each year, come hell or waters high, since 1864, when Charing Cross station had just opened and the MCC legalised overarm bowling. Nothing since, not World Wars, the passing of Kings and Queens, the fads and fancies of publishing, nor the sheer anachronistic madness of putting out a book of stats annually when all of that info is on the phone you’re pocketing as you walk into the do, has so far stopped it – although the pandemic did see a radical slimming-down of its bulky spine.

I'm not sure how many times I’ve been, but it’s a few now. If you’re fortunate enough to have made a contribution to the book, a reassuringly thick invitation lands on the doormat soon after Christmas and you’re de-mothing the dinner jacket once again. The first time I went, more than a decade ago, the event was a sort of curtain raiser to the season, a glimpse of the hallowed turf while the evening light was still milky, but to take place before the first deliveries are sent down now it would have to happen some time in early February, and I’m pretty sure the Almanack isn’t even finished by then.

Writing for the Almanack was daunting at first. If you like cricket, you’re aware that whatever you do will be in there for what is – on the available evidence – forever, and will be collected and referred to not just by the book’s cohort of obsessives but will somehow have to stand the test of time, too. I could never really loosen up and get it right. Ironically, it was when I was commissioned to do a piece on the book itself, and those who hunt down the Holy Grail of the legendary ‘full set’ – an original copy from each year of publication – that it really felt like fun and I at last got into it.

Whether John Wisden knew it or not, there is something about men and collecting (and it is almost entirely men) that has powered the book through all of those years. I think he probably did, because that first volume tapped into the Victorian fad for Almanacks and their mystical ephemera, an early internet that listed star signs and astrological phenomena alongside the dates of famous battles, the winners of the Boat Race and ‘the rules of quoits, bowls and knurr & spell’.

The Little Wonder had found a magic formula, although dark rumours persist about where exactly he got it. There was Wisden’s frenemy, John Lillywhite, who had been publishing The Guide To Cricketers since 1849, and then there was the diary of a decadent and ill-fated aristo called Francis Elwes, a pal of John Wisden’s whose private diary of 1863 contained much of the same info as the first Almanack – right down to a couple of mistakes in boat race times obtained by Elwes and apparently copied by Wisden.

For collectors there are certain editions that are the hardest to get and often require the expertise of dealers who specialise in the arcane knowledge needed. There is ‘proper money’ in the early hardbacks of the 1890s, while the wartime editions of 1917, 1918 and 1919 alone could set you back a five figure sum. Wisden 1916 is especially collectable because it contains the obituaries of WG Grace and Victor Trumper. Rarest of all, for reasons that no-one really knows, is the 1875 edition, which in its original paper wrappers might sell for somewhere around £40,000, depending on the market at the time.

The minutiae matters. Once you have a full set, which may include a couple of facsimilie editions or a book missing one of the yellow dust jackets that arrived in 1965, the quest for a ‘true set’ begins. “The purest,” said a collector called Bill Furmedge, “is 1864-1895, completely original paperback with completely original covers and spines. No replacement pages. 1896 to present day, completely original hardbacks. From 1965, that Wisden must have its original yellow dust jacket. Seventeen people who are living today, that I know, have sets of that description.”

Mind you, he told me that in 2022, so it’s probably changed by now.

At the dinner, the five cricketers of the year get their own special leather-bound copies, which is always a nice moment. There are some legendary faces at the better tables, and each year there’s a speaker, whose identity is usually kept under wraps. The best I’ve seen was Andy Zaltzman, who, along with being the TMS scorer is a stand-up comedian. He divided the room completely, some sitting in silence while the other half erupted. I still remember one joke he made about Kevin Pietersen playing for the Lahore Qalanders by zoom that landed perfectly with the zeitgeist, albeit that the silent section of the guests had no idea what zoom (or probably Kevin Pietersen) was.

The editor makes a speech too. Under Lawrence Booth the Almanack has become a spiky, moral voice for the game, his editor’s notes regularly dealing out a well-deserved kicking to the various administrative flops and foul-ups. One year the then-ECB chairman Giles Clarke, according to the Daily Mail’s report, “loudly harrangued” Lawrence after the speeches for something or other to do with Paul Downton and – that man again – KP.

Yes, men arguing over a book at a fancy dinner – that’s the content we go for. Plus the history and the sense of occasion, and the Little Wonder itself, part Bible, part historical record, part provocation… above all a reassuring presence in an uncertain world that has changed immeasurably while the book sails unstoppably on.