A final look at the "twelfth" edition

In the past several essays, I have looked in detail at the "twelfth" edition of Hoyle's Games. The first described what must be the authorized edition (A), as it is always autographed by Hoyle and Osborne. A second essay noted common elements among the three variants, (B), (C), and (D), and concludes that absent the autographs they are piracies. This essay will focus on the differences among the four books, concluding that they are four separate settings of type and therefore, four distinct editions.

First, some overall comments about the structure of the books, as  presented in the chart below. 

	(A)	(B)	(C)	(D)
chain lines	horizontal	vertical	horizontal	vertical
leaves per gathering	12	6	6	6
dimensions of largest copy seen	14.6 x 8.7	15.4 x 8.4	16.3 x 10.1	15.8 x 9.1

While all the books are duodecimos, only (A) is in twelves. One normally expects duodecimos to have horizontal chain lines, but there is a mixture here. Note that (C) and (D) are larger than (A), with (B) falling somewhere in the middle. Recall that Osborne advertised the book as "a small genteel pocket volume."

To determine if these books are four settings of type, we will first focus on pages 212 and 213, as those pages highlighted the differences that Marshall noted in Notes and Queries. As the earlier essays pointed out, page 212 was a logical end to the book, concluding the treatise on backgammon and having an erratum at the bottom. Page 213 is the late addition of "two new cases at whist, added since this book was printed off." You will need to click on the images to enlarge them (perhaps in a separate window) to follow the discussion below.

Variant (A)	Variant (B)
Variant (C)	Variant (D)

	(A)	(B)	(C)	(D)
ornaments	yes	yes	no	no
errata	yes	no	no	no
punctuation after law number	period	period	comma	period
"Man" in law 1 (212)	"M" is above "p" in "played" in line below	"M" is to the left of "p" in "played" in line below	"man" is not capitalized	"M" is above "p" in "played" in line below
"Parties" in last line of law 5 (212)	capitalized	capitalized	not capitalized	not capitalized
word on last three lines of first new case at whist (213)	nei- Cards win	neither in 6	If 3 to	If 3 to
second to last line (213)	"and that A has 4..."	"A has 4..."	"A has four..."	"A has 4..."

Looking only at the ornaments and the errata as Marshall did is not completely conclusive. It is possible that the type was left standing, but somebody needed the type ornaments for another printing job and they were removed. Similarly, the errata could have been corrected in a re-impression from the same type. However, we can look at differences in capitalization, line breaks, and spelling to conclude that we are looking at four distinct settings of type.

On page 212, only (A) and (D) have "Man" and "played" aligned similarly, but (A) capitalizes "Parties" in the last line, while (D) does not. So there are four distinct settings of page 212. We can reach the same conclusion about page 213 by looking at the ends of the lines of the first case at whist. Only (C) and (D) are the same, but (C) spells out "four" on the second to last line, while (D) uses a numeral.

I used these pages, because they are the ones noted by Marshall, but really the same analysis must be done for each gathering—in fact for each forme within a gathering. See "Pirates, Autographs, and A Bankruptcy" for an example (Whist.2.1) where some gatherings were reset and others not, and another (Whist.3 ve. rsus Whist.4) where some formes were reset and others not.

I have gone through the four variants gathering by gathering. The work would be much easier with a Hinman collator, but absent that I have convinced myself that no two are from the same setting of type.We are left with four editions, and with the exception of (A) which must have been first, I have not been able to determine priority. Indeed, it is not clear that (B), (C), and (D) were released in 1763 along with (A). Recall from the last essay that Brambles and others reprinted this text as late as 1807!