25 years ago, I got very excited when I scored a rare (or relatively rare) book in a second hand bookshop. Latterly, if I want such a book I sit on my backside for a few minutes, possibly only a few moments, find the book on-line, part company with my money and wait for the nice delivery person to bring the book to my door.
Back then, I made occasional trips to Hay-On-Wye and kept lists of books that I particularly wanted.
One such book was the original Boundary Book – a collection of essays about cricket from 1961. Not the oft-found “Second Innings” Boundary Book – also produced as a Lord’s Taverners fundraising machine – I acquired a copy of that easily enough and would always see multiple copies of that one in the Hay-On-Wye shops. It was the “hard to find” original I wanted.
I’m pretty sure I found it on this trip to Hay-On-Wye (along with several other places):
I particularly remember the unlikely circumstance in which I found the book. Not in any of the shops that had decent sports/cricket sections (where I was repeatedly told that the original Boundary Book was hard to find), but in a small, generalist bookshop that had caught my eye for some other reason. I asked, almost as an afterthought, if they had any cricket books. “Possibly”, I was told, “there’s just a shelf or two of sports books over there”.
There, on one of those sparse shelves, was my long-sought-after book. Not only a copy, but a copy in excellent condition, with the dust jacket in well preserved order and even the original cricket bat bookmark on a piece of ribbon. £3. I thought about it for a fraction of a second and eagerly bought the book. “Ah, you found a cricket book”, said the shopkeeper. “Believe it or not, I found the very one I was looking for”, said I. He smiled, probably thinking I was just being polite…or trying to be funny.
I didn’t really know what I would find in the original Boundary Book – other than a collection of essays written just before I was born. But for some years I had longed to satisfy that archetypal book-lover’s quest, to track down a particular desired book. In any case, I had the sense that some of the best essays that Lesley Frewin gathered for his charity fundraising cricket books project over the years will have been in the first of those books…and I was right about that. There are many truly excellent essays in that original Boundary Book.
One essay in particular was to have a profound effect on me and my future following of cricket – an essay by Stephen Potter (the One-Upmanship fellow), called Lord’smanship.
It was that essay, in which Potter confesses to being a member of Middlesex CCC (MCCC) but not a member of Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC), that caused me to plan to join Middlesex as a life member on my fortieth birthday, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Now I am a life member of both MCCC and the MCC. But I still like Bach and I still have a beard and I suspect that the sound I would emit saying “MCCC” would still be indistinguishable from “MCC”, especially if I were to say it after two or three G&Ts.