This is an updated and improved version of this valuable work, first published in 1991. Two other volumes complete the series, Volume 2: Local Histories and Volume 3: Biographical Studies of British Sportsmen, Sportswomen and Animals. I look forward to seeing them if they are as painstakingly compiled as Volume 1. I can truthfully say that I actually sat down and read sections of this work (something one does not normally do with a bibliography) and enjoyed myself. There are comprehensive notes on how the editor went about his task, together with a list of items included or not included, with explanations for omission. Thus any user of this book will know exactly what has been included or excluded and why. The editor also explains that the term “sport” is defined by a physical activity and thus does not include cerebral pursuits such as chess, bridge or poker. Other activities, such as sailing, are only included when the sport is competitive.
The editor, who is director of sport at UMIST (Manchester) and an occasional contributor to this journal, lists the public collections he consulted, as well as private and specialist collections to which referrence is made. He also trawled through dozens of current awareness publications, indexes and bibliographical serials and consulted the proceedings of some of the professional sports organizations and a number of specialist guides and select bibliographies. Scholarly texts were a further rich source of references. The bibliography is divided into two main parts. The first contains nation‐wide histories of sport, including sport and the economy and sport and gender. Part two, which is much the longer section, contains nation‐wide histories of individual sports, arranged alphabetically from Aerobatics to Yachting. Each entry has been given a sequential number, making it easy to locate from the author index. There is a short section also on sports relating to the Channel Islands, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Sport pertaining to specific places, e.g. motor racing at Brooklands or the Brighton Speed Trials, will be found in Volume 2 when it appears. Further explanations appear in the comprehensive Notes for the user section.
I could do no better than consult a section where I am most familiar with the literature, in my case motor‐car racing. This section includes works on Grand Prix, motor cross, rallying, and sports car racing in the UK up to the cut‐off date of December 2000. Contents include encyclopaedias, statistics and other reference works, and histories of individual marques involved in motor sport in the UK (e.g. Aston Martin, Bentley, Jaguar, etc). The editor also deals with the success of British cars abroad (for example, British cars at Le Mans, Works minis on the Monte Carlo Rally, etc). Special collections are listed, including the Library of the Royal Automobile Club, where once I was in charge. Without visiting this collection, I could not check the editor’s listings exhaustively, but from memory he seems to have missed very little from the essential references given here.
Other sections were equally fascinating and the whole work will be invaluable to sports historians, social historians, sport and physical education academics, librarians, journalists, book collectors and all others interested in the history of sport in the UK. There is a comprehensive author index and good cross‐referencing of chosen terms (e.g. mountaineering: see also rock climbing). I would unhesitatingly recommend this work for inclusion in all major public reference libraries, specialist collections and academic libraries of college or university departments dealing with sport in any form. I look forward to seeing the other two volumes in the series.
