The New Complete Sportsman; or, The Town and Country Gentleman's Recreation (Paperback)

Paperback. First published in London in 1785 by Alexander Hogg of Paternoster Row, The New Complete Sportsman is a late-Georgian compendium of English country diversions, attributed to one "Thomas Fairfax, Esq." and revised by "George Morgan, Esq." - both almost certainly trade pseudonyms used by Hogg's house. Within its 210 pages a country gentleman could learn to dress an artificial fly for the May rise, match a game cock by girth and length of stride, judge a hart's age by his slot and fewmets, manage a hunter on the morning of a race, breed pigeons in a south-facing dove-house, and net pheasants in October. The book preserves a working vocabulary - fewmets, dub, hackle, walk, form - that has since narrowed or vanished from the language. This Frontier Model Bibliophile edition reissues the 1785 text as a clean facsimile and frames it with a Note on the Edition, historical context, an editor's source-note on cock-fighting and the period's sporting vocabulary, and an annotated bibliography of works that inherit from this lineage of English sporting manuals. The New Complete Sportsman is a 210-page octavo compendium of English country sports, printed in London in 1785 for the bookseller Alexander Hogg of Paternoster Row, attributed on its title page to "Thomas Fairfax, Esq." and "Revised, Corrected and Improved, by George Morgan, Esq. Assisted by many Experienced Gentlemen." Its subject matter is the full register of late-Georgian field amusement: angling in all its branches, the breeding and fighting of game cocks, the rearing and backing of colts, the management of race-horses and hunters, fox-hunting, hare-hunting, hart and buck hunting, otter-hunting, coursing, the breeding of dogs for gun or chase, the breeding of pigeons and rabbits, the finding and shooting of partridges and pheasants, shooting flying - "together with many other equally curious articles, too numerous to mention." It is, in the editor's claim, "absolutely the Newest and most Complete Book on the Subject." The book belongs to a recognisable genre of late-18th-century English sporting manual: a borrowed-and-rebound compilation issued by a commercial London bookseller, attributed to a gentleman of plausible name, and pitched to a buyer who wanted a single three-shilling volume that would cover every diversion a country gentleman might pursue between Michaelmas and the close of trout season. The trade was crowded with such books, and the buyer was rarely a connoisseur of sources; he wanted the rod-and-reel material in one place, the kennel notes in another, the recipe for a game-cock's scouring diet next door, and a creditable frontispiece to justify the binding. Hogg, the publisher named on the imprint, was one of the most aggressive issuers of cheap practical compilations in the 1780s and 1790s, and his house style is visible here: a confident preface on the antiquity and dignity of manly exercises, a chatty editorial voice, the recurring rhetorical gesture of distinguishing the present "complete" treatment from the supposed inadequacy of all earlier books, and a borrowed body of technical instruction that draws - silently and without citation - on the standing literature of English sport stretching back to the Tudor manuals of George Turbervile and the early-Stuart Country Contentments of Gervase Markham, with Izaak Walton and Charles Cotton's tackle and fly-dressing tradition layered over the angling sections. The advertised price of three shillings, neatly bound, places the book firmly in the middle-buyer market: well below the gentleman-author treatises of Peter Beckford (whose Thoughts on Hunting had appeared in 1781 at a substantially higher price), but well above the sixpenny part-numbers in which Hogg also did a brisk trade. For a present-day reader the book matters chiefly as a document of vocabulary and stance. This item is printed on de Shipping may be from our UK warehouse or from our Australian or US warehouses, depending on stock availability.…