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, diaries and laws, are excluded from this analysis.

*Occasionally a book will not only undergo revision and updating, but on reprinting will be given a new title. An example would be Mark de Lacy with Peter Belliss's Think and Play Better Bowls which was first published in 1992. In 2007 a revised and updated version (by the same authors) was given the title Perfect Bowls. In this and similar cases, both first and subsequent titles are listed for the sake of simplicity and completeness, but count as one title in the total number of books listed.

Numbers

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