Somebody cleaning out his or her attic recently in the vicinity of Hertford, north of London, bundled up four old books and dropped them off at an Oxfam shop.

On Tuesday, those four books sold at auction for more than 8000 pounds…a bit over $12,000 dollars. That’s because the books were the first four Wisden Cricketers Almanacks, published in 1864, 5, 6, and 7. Even the World Wars failed to interrupt annual publication of the Almanack, which is regarded as Cricket’s Bible. The Oxfam shop’s manager, Pauline Wilby, recognized the prizes immediately. 

“Of course I knew what Wisden was,” she said later. “I was sorting out everything in the kitchen, and I knew immediately they were valuable.

Of course a clean attic is valuable, too, right?

Read more about the rare cricket books.  

All Aquiver with Love

Couples have been married at home plate, of course, baseball is the sort of sport that lends itself to that sort of thing.

But what about bow hunting? Yup, that too, according to Kim Silver and Marvin Hunter, if that really is his name. The two exchanged vows atop a tree stand platform at the Anamosa Bowhunters Archery Club in Iowa on June 27. The groom wore a camouflage shirt and trousers, while the bride was resplendent – albeit a little difficult to make out – in a silk camouflage gown.

The bride and groom interrupted the ceremony several times to shoot arrows at targets. Marvin Hunter – yeah, right – said he and his bride had always joked about getting married on a tree stand because “it just seemed like the right thing to do.”

See a photo of the ceremony and read more about the hunters’ wedding from MSNBC.

Angus Bell said of Batting on the Bosphorus, “Uh, yuh, liquor had something to do with it.”

Water figures in each book. Otherwise they’re not especially similar, except that each involves a quest. Ahab chased down the white whale. Angus Bell played cricket in a great many places in Eastern Europe, each less likely than the last. He saw it as a kind of mission, in part because he felt a psychic had foreseen the trip. Then when it was all over, he worried that the psychic might have been kidding.

Little more need be said about Batting on the Bosphorus beyond my mentioning that the most twisted passages in the book could have been written by Hunter S. Thompson if he’d gone in for cricket in Serbia, Belarus, Lithuania, and places of that nature, rather than for football at the Super Bowl.

Angus Bell, who has been known to describe himself as “a Scottish elf,” is a funny guy.