Cavendish on Piquet

Cavendish on Piquet by ?Cavendish?, published by Thomas de la Rue & Co. in 1890, is a wonderfully Victorian guide to one of the great card games of Europe, written in the days when a serious gentleman might be expected to understand Piquet with roughly the same confidence that he understood waistcoats, railway timetables and not discussing money in public. ?Cavendish? was the pen name of Henry Jones , one of the best-known nineteenth-century writers on card games, and a man who seems to have approached recreational card play with the seriousness normally reserved for constitutional law. Piquet, for the uninitiated, is a two-player card game with a long history, considerable subtlety and enough scoring terminology to make a casual observer suspect that somebody has accidentally introduced bookkeeping into leisure. Which, in a sense, they had. The game was already centuries old by the time this book appeared, but Victorian Britain had a particular affection for codifying things. Rules. Etiquette. Scoring. Proper procedure. The exact circumstances under which somebody was entitled to look quietly triumphant. This was a civilisation that could take a pack of cards and produce a manual. Cavendish explains the game with the methodical confidence of a writer who has no doubt that the reader wishes to play properly. There is little tolerance here for vague improvisation. You are expected to know the rules. You are expected to understand the score. And if you lose repeatedly, the problem is probably not the book. The appeal today is partly practical and partly historical. Anyone interested in traditional card games will find a direct account from an age when games such as Piquet were part of ordinary educated leisure rather than specialist curiosities. At the same time, the book offers a glimpse into the social world around card play. Before television. Before radio. Before smartphones. People had evenings. Quite long ones. Cards helped. Piquet in particular had the advantage of requiring only two players, making it ideal for situations where a bridge party could not be assembled or where one simply wished to defeat a single opponent thoroughly rather than three people simultaneously. There is something very elegant about the whole business. Two players. Thirty-two cards. Rules refined over generations. No batteries. No updates. No message announcing that the server is unavailable. The game begins when the cards are dealt. Civilisation proceeds. Published by Thomas de la Rue & Co. , a name inseparably associated with playing cards and printing, this 1890 volume has exactly the sort of provenance one hopes for in an old book on card games. It feels less like a modern retrospective and more like an object from the culture it describes. This is not a book pretending to be Victorian. It actually is Victorian. And it has survived accordingly. Condition: Fair, but really quite a nice example for its age. The book is in generally good condition overall, but there are some faults which keep it from a higher grade. The rear inner cover hinge has an old Sellotape repair , presumably applied by a previous owner some time ago in the entirely understandable belief that adhesive tape represented the future of conservation. The binding is slightly loose rather than tight , but remains together. There are no major gaps between the signatures , although one section shows the slightest hint of separation, around 1mm . So this is not a pristine, razor-tight collector?s copy. Nor is it falling apart. It sits in that much more interesting middle ground occupied by many genuinely old books: complete, attractive, usable, structurally a little tired and wearing evidence that people have cared enough about it over the years to keep repairing it. For a book published in 1890 , that seems entirely respectable. It is a nice example rather than a museum specimen. And frankly, a Victorian card-game manual with absolutely no wear would raise questions of its own. Fo. …