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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Ella Creamer

British Library acquires ultra-rare cricket book thanks to anonymous donor

Frontispiece of A Collection of All the Grand Matches of Cricket played in England within Twenty Years from 1771 to 1791.
Epps’ Cricket … only four copies have ever come up at auction. Photograph: Peter Harrington

The British Library has acquired a “virtually unobtainable” cricket book after a mysterious donor funded the sale of the copy that once belonged to famed cricket commentator John Arlott.

The anonymous benefactor donated £180,000 after discovering that William Epps’s 1799 book of scorecards from cricket’s early days was not part of any institutional collection.

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