Summer’s Crown by the inimitable Stephen Chalke has been established as the definitive history of the County Championships. Mayukh Ghosh tells us how this impeccable project was almost derailed right at the beginning because of the whims of the publishing industry.

In the early 1990s, two books on the history of the County Championship were published.
One written by Robert Brooke. The other by Eric Midwinter.
Brooke’s book, as expected, was almost wholly statistical.
Midwinter, on the other hand, once again expectedly, emphasised on the history and evolution of the championship.
He thought that the two books nicely complemented each other.
But neither of them was the definitive work on the subject.

Twenty years later, in December 2012, out of the blue, Stephen Chalke got a call from Chris Lane of the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack. By then Wisden had been bought by Bloomsbury, who had made a fortune from the Harry Potter books.

In Chalke’s words: “On behalf of Bloomsbury he made an offer to buy Fairfield Books – our existing stock, the e-book rights to our titles and our mailing list – for what was a good sum of money. In exchange, I was to write four books for them. He instructed me to hire a solicitor at their expense so that we could complete the deal formally.

We had a meeting, and he asked me to put forward some ideas for titles I could write. He floated the idea that I might start up a series of quarterly monographs, of the size of A Summer of Plenty (2006) and Five Five Five (2007), writing some myself and commissioning writers for others; if I did this for two or three years, it could count as two of the four titles.

“I spent a couple of weeks producing a display folder about Fairfield Books, with details of all our titles and a list of eight ideas for books. The list included (i) the series of monographs, (ii) a sequel to Runs in the Memory (1997) and Caught in the Memory (1999) about the 1970s and (iii) a history of the county championship. Those were the ones I thought they’d pick. After several weeks of hearing nothing, Chris Lane rang to say that the deal was off. Bloomsbury thought none of my ideas were commercially viable. Did they still want the e-book rights or the mailing list? No, nothing at all. I was shocked by the abruptness, and I could tell that he was not happy with the turn of events.”

And then, ECB chipped in. Perhaps, in the last decade or so, their greatest contribution to the history of the game.

“Not long afterwards, I got a call from David Collier, then the Chief Executive of the ECB. They had heard about Wisden’s treatment of me and wondered if they could offer me some financial support for my next book. What was I thinking of writing? I mentioned the county championship history, which was just a possibility in my head at that stage, and he showed immediate enthusiasm.

Suddenly I was writing a history of the county championship with a grant from the ECB, a grant that made it possible for me to buy in lots of photographs and produce it to a standard I would not otherwise have been able to do.

“I rang Chris Lane to tell him that I was going to be writing a history of the county championship for the ECB. ‘Oh, but we were going to ask you to do that,’ he said, which was odd as he had told me that none of my ideas were commercial.

“In truth, I’m pleased that the deal fell through. I’ve got used to working for myself and doing things my own way. I would only have got into rows with them about things like the jacket design and the quality of paper.”

*Stephen Chalke addresses the audience after accepting the 2015 Cricket Book of the Year Award from the Cricket Writers’ Club. Photo courtesy Arunabha Sengupta*

Summer’s Crown was launched on March 24th 2015.
It won the Cricket Book of the Year award from the Cricket Writers’ Club.
It has since been reprinted and updated till the end of the 2016 county championship season.

It is still available from http://www.fairfieldbooks.org.uk, priced at a modest £15.

All of Stephen Chalke’s books have been praised widely and Summer’s Crown was not an exception.

The ultimate praise, perhaps, came from a reader on the website of The Guardian.
He wrote: "Summer's Crown is the answer to pretty much all of life's problems."

I too, on occasions, have felt the same….