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[Early depiction of children playing cricket and other bat-sports].
Uncle Tom's Treasury. The Birth-day Party.
Publisher: Webb, Millington & Co. Leeds;
Date of Publication: 1854
Stock Code: 12798
Octavo pamphlet in paper wraps. 8 unsigned pages of captioned hand-coloured woodcuts, inner forme blank. Golden yellow covers; title and vignette within border to upper cover; advertisements to lower cover. Date from gift inscription to first page. Covers scuffed and rubbed; small marginal tear to foredge of contents, continues to covers; spine re-stitched. Small numeral in ink to second page. A rare children’s book from a prolific Yorkshire printer and publisher. Eight illustrations depict various games played by children at a birthday paper including marbles, cricket, ‘shuttlecock’, and a now obscure bat-sport known as ‘trap-bat and ball’. As an ancestor to cricket, trap-bat involves a batsman with a paddle-shaped bat hitting a walnut-sized ball called a ‘knurr’ from a fixed position, ‘the trap’. Webb, Millington & Co. were a an Otley-based printer of chapbooks, toy books, and jobbing ephemera operative from c. 1832-1882. Publishing through London agents such as Dean and Son, they produced a variety of juvenilia from ‘stock blocks’. Much of their output is now rare, as the factory was destroyed in a fire in 1882. A record of sporting cousins to cricket, the illustrations in this book are an exceedingly rare depiction of provincial English bat-sports. £350.00