Wisden Almanack: History, Awards and Contents

The 1864 edition ran to 112 pages and contained, along with the cricket, the rules of quoiting, the dates of the Crusades and a list of the winners of the Derby. A modern edition runs past 1,400 pages, has no quoiting in it, and is the closest thing cricket has to a legal record. It has appeared every single year since 1864, through two world wars, which makes it the longest continuously published sports annual in existence.

Calling it the bible of cricket is a cliché, and the interesting thing about the cliché is how literally the game treats it. County scorers reconcile against it. Statisticians cite an edition and a page rather than a database. When a scorecard is disputed, the resolution is what Wisden printed. That authority was not conferred by a governing body; it accumulated, edition by edition, because the book kept turning up and kept being right.

This guide covers what is actually in it, how the awards work, who has edited it and what difference that has made, and — since no reference work is neutral — what it has historically left out.

1864: a fast bowler with a sports shop

John Wisden was a professional cricketer of genuine quality before he was a publisher. He was a small man who bowled fast, and his most cited performance was taking all ten wickets in an innings at Lord's in 1850, every one of them bowled. He ran a sports equipment business in London, and in 1864 he brought out an almanack under his own name to sit alongside it — a piece of business promotion that outlived the business.

The first editions were miscellanies in the Victorian style: cricket scores mixed with general reference material, because a purchaser of an annual in 1864 expected an annual to tell him things. The cricket content gradually crowded everything else out over the following decades, and what remained was a specialised reference work. Wisden himself died in 1884, twenty years into it, and had no idea what he had started.

The timing was fortunate. The almanack's early decades coincided with the formalisation of English county cricket and the beginning of Test cricket, which meant it was in place, printing full scorecards, exactly when the game acquired a structure worth recording. The competition it grew up alongside is set out in the guide to the County Championship.

What is actually inside it

The architecture of a modern edition is worth setting out, because people who have never opened one assume it is a book of statistics and it is not. It is a book of records with a very large amount of prose in it.

Section	What it does
Notes by the Editor	The editorial essay: the year's arguments, stated with an opinion
Five Cricketers of the Year	Portrait essays on the five, one per player
Comment and features	Commissioned essays and obituary-length assessments
Records	The game's all-time record section, revised annually
Reviews of the season	Every Test, every ODI and T20I, every county match, with full scorecards
Overseas cricket	First-class and international cricket in every Test-playing country
Obituaries	Deaths in the cricket world over the year
The laws, and the year's governance	Regulatory changes, disciplinary matters, administration
Book and index sections	The year's cricket writing, plus a full index

The scorecards are the foundation, and their completeness is the reason the book matters. A county match played in front of two hundred people in April is recorded to the same standard as a Lord's Test — batting, bowling, fall of wickets, umpires, toss, close-of-play scores. If you have not worked with a full scorecard before, the explainer on reading a cricket scorecard covers the conventions Wisden uses, and the statistics glossary covers the terms.

Notes by the Editor

The essay at the front is the almanack's distinctive institution and the reason the editorship is a job people care about. It is not a foreword. It is a signed piece of argument about the state of the game, printed in a reference work, in which the editor is free to say that an administrator has behaved badly or that a decision was wrong.

Sydney Pardon introduced it, and its function has stayed remarkably stable: the Notes are where Wisden stops being a record and becomes a voice. Editors have used them to attack throwing, to argue about over-rates, to condemn apartheid-era tours, to complain about the fixture list, and to take positions on franchise cricket, and because the almanack sits on shelves for a century, the Notes have a permanence that newspaper comment does not. An editor writing them knows the piece will be read in 2090.

The Five Cricketers of the Year

This is the oldest individual award in cricket, and it works differently from every other award in sport.

It began in 1889, when the almanack honoured six great bowlers of the year. The number and the framing settled into five cricketers, and two conventions grew up around it that have shaped its character:

• A player can be chosen only once in a career. There is no repeat winner. This means the honour marks an arrival rather than a sustained peak, and it also means some of the greatest cricketers who ever played appear exactly once, early.
• Selection has traditionally rested on the previous English season. The award is the editor's, made on the basis of cricket played in England, which is why the list is heavy with county professionals and with overseas players who happened to tour.

The consequences are odd and largely acknowledged as such. A great cricketer who never had a notable English summer could be missed. A county seamer with one extraordinary year is in the same list as an all-time great. The award is not a ranking of the world's best players; it is a record of who mattered in a particular English summer, and reading the list decade by decade gives you a sharper history of the domestic game than any table would.

The separate honour of Leading Cricketer in the World was introduced in the 2000s to do the job the Five explicitly does not: name the single best cricketer on the planet over a calendar year, regardless of where they played. It can be won more than once.

The obituaries

The obituary section is the part of Wisden that people who do not follow cricket have heard of, and it deserves its reputation. It records the deaths of Test cricketers and county professionals, and also of umpires, scorers, groundsmen, administrators, club stalwarts and the occasional person whose only qualification is a single first-class appearance sixty years earlier.

The writing is compressed and frequently very good, and the section's editorial position is that a life in cricket is worth recording whether or not it was distinguished. A man who played four matches for Somerset in 1953 gets a paragraph. So does a groundsman who prepared a square for forty years. It is the clearest statement of what the almanack thinks it is for: not a hall of fame but a register.

1938, and the yellow cover

The book acquired its visual identity later than most people assume. For its first seven decades it came in a paper wrapper. In 1938 a redesign, overseen by the typographer Robert Harling, gave it a yellow linen cover carrying a wood engraving by Eric Ravilious: two top-hatted Victorian cricketers, one batting, one bowling, in tight trousers.

That engraving has been on the cover ever since, which makes it one of the longest-running pieces of commissioned graphic design in British publishing. Ravilious was a significant artist independently of it — he died on active service in 1942 — and the engraving's survival is partly luck: it was made for one edition and became permanent because nobody could think of a reason to replace it.

The yellow itself now functions as a trademark. A shelf of Wisdens is instantly identifiable across a room, and the completeness of a run is a collectable property in its own right; full sets from 1864 are among the most valuable items in sporting book collecting.

The editors, and how much one person shapes it

Wisden has had relatively few editors, and each has left a visible mark on the book's temperature.

Editor	Tenure	Contribution
Sydney Pardon	1891–1925	Longest-serving; introduced Notes by the Editor
Hubert Preston, then Norman Preston	mid-century	Father and son; Norman edited 29 editions from 1952 until his death in 1980
Matthew Engel	1990s and 2000s	Twelve editions across two spells; sharpened the writing
Scyld Berry	from the 2008 edition	Cricket correspondent's eye for the technical
Lawrence Booth	from the 2012 edition	Current editor; expanded coverage of the women's game

Pardon's thirty-five years remain the longest tenure, and the Notes were his invention. Norman Preston's twenty-nine editions covered the whole of the post-war reorganisation of English cricket, from the abolition of amateur status to the arrival of one-day competition, and he died in office. Graeme Wright and Tim de Lisle each edited in the years between Engel's two spells.

The editorship is a genuinely powerful position in cricket because the editor decides the Five, writes the Notes, and commissions the features — three levers that between them set a good deal of the game's annual conversation in England. There is no equivalent role in any other sport.

Women in the almanack

This is the clearest case of the almanack's blind spots and of its correction, and it is worth setting out with dates rather than generalities.

The Five Cricketers of the Year ran from 1889 for one hundred and twenty years without a woman in it. That ended with the 2009 edition, in which Claire Taylor — England's leading run-scorer in the World Cup win of the previous year — was named alongside James Anderson, Dale Benkenstein, Mark Boucher and Neil McKenzie. She was the first woman honoured since the award began.

Since then the change has been rapid rather than gradual. The Wisden Leading Woman Cricketer in the World was established in 2015, with Meg Lanning of Australia as its first recipient. The 2018 edition, following England's home World Cup victory, honoured Heather Knight, Nat Sciver and Anya Shrubsole among its Cricketers of the Year, and Shrubsole became the first woman to appear on the almanack's cover. Coverage of the women's international and domestic seasons is now a standing part of the book rather than an appendix.

The honest reading of that sequence is that Wisden reflected the game's neglect of women's cricket for a century and then moved faster than most of the game's institutions once it started. The longer history it was slow to record is set out in the guide to England women's cricket.

Wisden as a record, and its limits

Three things are worth understanding about relying on it.

The first is that its authority is a matter of practice, not law. No governing body appointed Wisden as the game's registrar. It became one because it printed accurately, printed everything, and printed every year, and because the alternative sources were partial. Where a modern statistical database and an old Wisden disagree, the almanack is usually — not always — the one that gets checked.

The second is that its centre of gravity is English. The book covers cricket everywhere and always has, but the season it reviews most fully is the English one, the award it gives is decided on English form, and the Notes address English administration. That is a description rather than a criticism; it is what the book was built to be. It is also why serious researchers on subcontinental cricket use it alongside local sources rather than instead of them.

The third is that it is a record and not an argument. The scorecards will tell you that a bowler took five wickets. They will not tell you whether the pitch was fit or the selection sensible — those judgements live in the Notes and the features, clearly separated from the record, which is the structural discipline that has kept the book trustworthy for a hundred and sixty years.

The other English institution built on the same principle — describing cricket accurately and at length for people who want the detail — is covered in the history of Test Match Special. The club that codified the laws Wisden reports on is covered in the guide to MCC's role in cricket, the players its awards have marked are surveyed in England's greatest Test players, and the rest of the English game is mapped from the cricket in England hub.

Sources and method

This guide rests on the almanack's own published history and on Wisden's account of its origins: the 1864 first edition and its length, John Wisden's playing career including his ten wickets at Lord's in 1850, and his death in 1884. The 1938 redesign, Robert Harling's involvement and Eric Ravilious's wood engraving are matters of published record. The editors' tenures given — Sydney Pardon from 1891 to 1925, Norman Preston's twenty-nine editions from 1952 to his death in 1980, Matthew Engel's twelve editions, Scyld Berry from the 2008 edition and Lawrence Booth from the 2012 edition — follow the almanack's published list. The Five Cricketers of the Year is dated to 1889 from the almanack's own record of the award; Claire Taylor's selection in the 2009 edition and the names alongside her, the 2015 establishment of the Leading Woman Cricketer in the World with Meg Lanning as its first recipient, and the 2018 edition's honours are drawn from contemporary published reports. Page extents for modern editions vary year to year and are given approximately. Nothing here is computed from our own datasets.