A Century and a Quarter of Hoyle

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, this article documents the Proprietor’s success and the reasons for it. The study provides a nuanced perspective of the impact of the Donaldson decision on an unfamiliar genre of literature.