Dante would have pictured another Inferno.
The Billiard Player. May 15, 1921
A member of a local club, who writes feelingly, says that the committee has dismissed the caretaker, and its members in turn take charge of the club. The billiard table and accessories are rapidly deteriorating. It being nobody’s duty to keep these in order, nobody does anything. One night recently two visitors started a game. After a succession of changed cues, miss-cues, lost tips, and flukes, one said to the other: “If billiards had been played here in Dante’s time he ought to have been a visitor; he would have pictured another Inferno. It would be an ill-ventilated room with broken gas mantles, and a gas fire without bricks. A billiard table with a switchback bed and perforated pockets would be set upon an oscillating floor. The balls would be elliptical, and the cues of the corkscrew type without tips. Rests would be broken or missing. Concave and convex mirrors would line the walls. All who neglected their duty on this earth and permitted a good billiard table and accessories to go to the dogs, would be locked in this room, and compelled to remain until they had made a 100 break under existing conditions. And that would be never.”