I found a gem in a second-hand bookshop in Beverley, East Yorkshire, last week. It was a complete set of four-volume Encyclopaedia of Sport and Games, edited by the Earl of Suffolk and Berkshire and published in London in 1911. I’ve done a fair amount of work on late Victorian and Edwardian sporting literature in the past, and it was a pleasure to get this set. Between them, the four volumes contain hundreds of entries on the whole of the Edwardian sporting world.

It is sometimes tempting to expect reference books like this to be objective as well as authoritative, but dealing with historical sources alerts us to the subjectivities in all writing. These texts are certainly authoritative. They cover, in meticulous detail, everything from bowling techniques in cricket to advice on how to bait a hook to catch a trout. Alongside this authority, the subjectivities – the features that place it in its time and in the culture of its authors – come through in many ways. First, there is the subject matter itself, which shows up how ‘sport’ meant an awful lot more than just team games. While the first volume goes somewhat tamely from ‘A to Cricket’, things hot up with Volume 2, ‘Crocodile to Hound-Breeding’. Volume 3 keeps up the pace from ‘Hunting to Racing’, with the equally exotic Volume 4 running from ‘Rackets to Zebras’. This isn’t simply a set for the country sports brigade, but also for big game hunters – or, at least, those who liked to read about shooting wild boar in Europe, elephants in Africa, and grizzly bears in north America. As such, the books serve as a great reminder of how relative the word ‘sport’ is.

Beyond the subject headings, the assumptions and subjectivities of the authors come through in the text itself. Class-based assumptions run through the sniffy discussion of Northern Rugby Union and professional football. Women are left on the sidelines. Cars and motorboats, the preserve of the richest, are coming into sport alongside horses and boats. Royals and aristocrats from various nations are shown exploring the world’s wilder zones and killing its wilder animals, with indigenous people there simply as servants to help the white men do the shooting. Information about expanding railways in Africa and north America is there for people to plan their trips, an interesting piece of evidence about how the globalisation of sport has an imperial history based around travel, exploration, and hunting. Any belief in the objectivity of the encyclopaedia as a form is made irrelevant in the face of such social and cultural positioning.

Indeed, the frequent use of first person narratives to explain points makes some of the entries read like travelogues. My favourite here is the section on African elephants, written by the famous soldier and explorer Frederick Selous, large parts of which are dedicated to the ‘narrative of our pursuit’ of elephants with a Hottentot hunter and a team of ‘Kaffirs’ in Matabeleland. This kind of writing, full of exciting details about the hunt, and observations about the behaviour of both the animals and his companions, would never make it into an encyclopaedia today, but it fits perfectly here. The first person voices bring with them a sense of expertise and experience which readers would have found reassuring, and which give us a real sense of what these events were like.

It is important to stress that this is all useful. To criticise a historical source for using a writing style that we no longer consider appropriate, or to be written from a perspective which we do not share, would be ludicrous. Instead, you need to recognise the ideologies and assumptions that underpin the text, and work with them. Think about the language that the authors use, and how that positions them. Think about what they leave out of texts as well as what they put in. Think about how contemporary audiences would have received them. Never dismiss an old reference book just because its information and its attitudes are out of date: instead, use it as way into the sport and the society of the time from which it comes.