Author: MAYER (John):
Title: The Sportsman's Directory; or, Park and Gamekeeper's Companion: Containing Instructions for Breeding, Feeding, and Breaking Dogs; Hunting, Coursing, and Shooting; Fishing, Preserving Game, and Decoys; Breeding Pheasants, Partridges, Pigeons, Rabbits, &c. &c. Also a Descreption of all Kinds of Poaching; how to Detect Poachers, and to Destroy their Works. Upwards of 50 Valuable Recipes, and Abstracts of the Lst Game Laws. Fourth Edition
Description: London: Printed for Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy; Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown..., 1823. 12mo, 195 x 110 mms., pp. vii [viii blank], 214 [215 adverts, 216 blank], engraved frontispiece (by J. Shary), 7 woodcut illustrations in text, all edges uncut, recently rebound in full chocolate morocco, gilt spine, with original paper covers loosely inserted. A fine copy John Mayer's Sportsman's Directory was first published, for the author, in Colchester in 1815; it continued to be reprinted for many decades. A gamekeeper himself, Mayer, probably had other gamkeepers in mind as his putative audience, and, as P. B. Munsche in "The Gamekeeper and English Rural Society, 1660 - 1830" (Journal of British Studies, 1981) points out that "In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there were in England at any given time between 3,500 and 4,000 working gamekeepers." The first edition of 1815 was reviewed in The Critical Review with mixed results: "...we have perused it, though with very little accession to our sporting information. The diction of it is so prolific in slang terms, and its rules take so much for granted, that, except to professed sportsmen, gamekeepers, dog breeders, and the tribe of lacquey huntsmen, we do not think it is calculated to be of much utility, Gentlemen who only follow the sports of their field for their occasional recreation, would not, in our opinion, derive much instruction from its perusal, because they could not understand it without having constant recourse to a sporting dictionary; and we consider ourselves not very anxious about hunting, hawking, or fishing as to study the technicalities of their language." OCLC find copies of this fourth edition at National Library of Wales; Delaware, Lake Superior State University, and Harvard,

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