WG Grace: A Leviathan Was He

Martin Chandler | 9:46am BST 31 March 2024

Published: 1997
Pages: 4
Author: Rosenwater, Irving
Publisher: Private
Rating: 3.5 stars

This is the second of two Rosenwater monographs devoted to WG Grace. Applying the description of a Leviathan to the great man is not something I had heard before, but is entirely appropriate in the context of what Rosenwater sets out to do.

The three pages of text in this A4 sized monograph are devoted to statistics, but not the ones that are widely known. As an example the starting point is that on the date on which Grace scored his fiftieth century no one else in the game had scored more than eleven (Henry Jupp), and those fifty represented approaching half of the centuries that at that point in time had been recorded (109). The point of the monograph is therefore to demonstrate WG’s dominance, and that Leviathan was indeed the word.

WG Grace: A Leviathan Was He contains some thought provoking stuff and is a fascinating few minutes read. Produced in a limited edition of just twenty copies it is one of the more costly of Rosenwater’s later monographs, although for anyone keen to read the text of it without the outlay the content also appeared in the Autumn 1997 issue of the Journal of the Cricket Society.