Championship billiards. Old and New.

The endeavor, then, has been to supply the wants of billiard lovers —themselves too busy to search through larger books —and allow them to discover this or that record almost at a glance. Given a new author, fresh material may be presumed. Aside from the records, the matter herein contained can not be found elsewhere.
That no rules have been inserted in this publication is because the compiler does not wish to still further complicate arguments which can never be settled until, as in England, the American billiard experts hold a meeting, revise the old rules, and make such new ones as the great improvement in the game of billiards most imperatively calls for. To-day mooted points can not be settled, as authorities equally good disagree, and the bedrock upon which the code was first planted is overlaid with the accretions of alluvium brought from fields of thought widely distributed. In casting an eye over the records herein contained, the hypercritical may cry, “As I supposed ; ever more and more mistakes,” arguing from the well ventilated knowledge of the imperfection in the records of billiards; and it is true that the writer has not reproduced to the fraction of a hair the difference in, for instance, grand averages.
Book from private collection