Post Padwick

Archie Mac | 12:00am BST 12 May 2008

Published: 2008
Pages: 628
Author: Gibbs, Stephen
Publisher: Stephen W Gibbs
Rating: 4 stars

In 1970 E.W. (Tim) Padwick was charged with producing ‘A Bibliography of Cricket’ it took him seven years to complete, and was eventually referred to as ‘Padwick’s’. This was cemented when the second volume released in 1991 and compiled by Stephen Eley and Peter Griffiths was named simply ‘Padwick’s’.

In 2001 I became a little frustrated with the fact that no new update had been released in ten years, and so contacted Stephen Eley of Padwick’s Vol 2 fame by email. He kindly responded, but stated he thought it unlikely that there would ever be a future edition in print. He did however express the hope that in the future someone might produce an electronic version of Padwick that would be much easier to update. Mr. Eley also revealed the great amount of investigative work he had undertaken in the production of Padwick’s Vol 2, but despite a short print run was unable to sell all of the copies printed.

In 2004 Australian cricket historian Stephen W Gibbs released ‘Not In Padwick’ which contained a number of publications that had been missed by the original authors.

Gibbs went one further in 2008 after years of researching releasing Post Padwick: The Gibbs Extension of Padwick’s Bibliography: 1990-2006, which is a monumental effort, with 7049 new listings.

Stephen W Gibbs is a cricket expert’s expert, his cricketing CV is extremely impressive; including ‘The Gibbs Index (1 & 2)’ which contains comprehensive indexes for players, authors, administrators. The other volume (one) contains a comprehensive index for places, tours, photographs etc. There are only two copies of these indexes one of which is housed in the Melbourne cricketing library.

Gibbs has also contributed to a number of cricketing publications including Wisden Australia and most Australian cricketing journals. In fact Mr. Gibbs was kind enough to furbish myself with six pages of his cricket writing achievements (please contact CW if you would like more information).

In an email Mr. Gibbs set down what he thought the most difficult part of producing Post Padwick:

‘a HUGE job was getting stuff in the right order, and assigning a unique number to each item and cross referencing that to the index entries (at least one error which you have alerted to me); also regularising the style/format of individual entries, the various headings etc’.

The error that Mr. Gibbs refers too is a small book of cricket poetry that I have, which was not found in Post Padwick. This may well be the worst cricket book publication that I have had to suffer through (although I completed it), half a star would be the rating.

This is a LTD edition of just 120 numbered and signed copies, and is only available from: Roger Page 10 Ekari Court Yallambie Victoria 3085 Tel: 03 9435 6332