The Edmond Hoyle Home Page

by David Levy
updated January 1, 2024.
Copyright © 2011-2024 by David Levy. All rights reserved.

Welcome to the Edmond Hoyle Home Page!

Edmond Hoyle (1672-1769) was the first English writer on the rules and strategy of popular games. He wrote about whist, backgammon, piquet, chess, quadrille and brag, as well as a book about probability.

I have been studying the writings of Edmond Hoyle over the past many years and have, at long last, started to write a descriptive bibliography of Hoyle. You can see the technical book descriptions here.

I'd be anxious to hear from other Hoyle collectors and researchers.

Publications

"Pirates, Autographs, and a Bankruptcy: A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist by Edmond Hoyle, Gentleman" in Script & Print, 34 no. 3 (2010): 133-61.

Abstract: Edmond Hoyle wrote and published A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist (1742), the first instructional, analytic book about any card game. After first edition went out of print, Hoyle sold the rights to bookseller Francis Cogan. While Cogan was preparing a second edition, two printers produced pirated versions. The two-month battle between Cogan and the pirates included marketing campaigns, expanded versions of the work, and litigation. The story of piracy is here told for the first time using clues from the physical books, contemporary newspaper advertisements, and archival records. We are left with books with unusual bibliographical features, the most famous of which is the autograph signature of Hoyle in all authorized copies. The paper concludes with a descriptive bibliography of the versions of A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist published between 1742 and 1744.
With the kind permission of Script and Print, I can offer the journal cover, my article, and the appendices.

"A Century and a Quarter of Hoylen" in The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 24 no. 2 (June 2023): 169-208.

Abstract: Edmond Hoyle wrote the first instructional books on the strategy for card play in the 1740s. The copyright owners, the Proprietors, published them successfully as Hoyle's Games for a generation. The 1774 decision in Donaldson v Beckett invalidated the copyright and the Proprietors faced legal competition for the first time. Competing booksellers published innovative gaming manuals, marketing them as improved versions of Hoyle, with clearer prose, treatment of additional games, and new formats.
Despite the loss of copyright protection and the resulting competition, an ever-changing group of Proprietors dominated the market for gaming literature until the 1860s. With a bibliographical examination of the books, supplemented by archival records of the book trade, "A Century and a Quarter of Hoyle" documents the Proprietor's success and the reasons for it. This study provides a nuanced perspective of the impact of the Donaldson decision on an unfamiliar genre of literature.

Blogging about Hoyle

Edmond Hoyle, Gent. is my blog with bibliographical and other musings about the writings of Edmond Hoyle and other gaming literature. One- and two-year anniversary essays are here: