Books by Decade

Introduction

This facility allows you to search for books by year of first publication and should prove of benefit not only to those who are primarily interested in locating more recent publications, but also to bowls historians. About ten per cent of the total number of books on the site have had to be excluded from this analysis because of the lack of a publication date - both in a few of the books in my collection and in some of the books that I don't own where information is incomplete. However, in a few cases it has been possible to allocate a book to a specific decade by making a reasoned estimate and these are shown as, for example, '1970s', '1980s', etc. Books that are regularly updated, such as yearbooks and laws, are excluded from this analysis.

Numbers

This histogram shows the number of books published by decade. Even allowing for the fact that this site is not exhaustive, my feeling is that the pattern shown here, when the heyday was the 1980s, is likely to be representative of the true picture.