For the love of the beautiful game
10 December 2024 The first tranche of the Phil Martin archive of football ephemera and literature comes for sale at Loddon Auctions on December 13.
Set of 18 Spanish trade cards from Jaime Box Chocolates which form a mosaic image of Barcelona footballer Paulino Alcantara. Estimate £80-120 at Loddon Auctions.
While many collectors are club specific, football historian and researcher Phil Martin has never been so partisan. His teams are Carlisle United first and the red side of Manchester second, but his collection was always about the bigger picture. “I’ve always been a fan of the whole game, rather, rather than particularly aligned to one club or country,” he says.
This month enthusiasts can get an auction taster of a sporting archive ranked as among the very best. The product of close to seven decades of collecting. Phil Martin’s collection numbers an estimated 10,000-plus items.
Next year it will be sold over several sales by collectables specialist Loddon Auctions, but the third day of the firm’s December 11-13 sale this year provides a 100-lot taste of some of the very rare things to come. It is a remarkably cosmopolitan mix embracing English, Scottish and continental European teams.
An important title covering the game ‘North of the Border’ is the first edition of the Scottish FA’s Football Annual, published by Weatherstone and Sons in 1875-76. Fewer than a dozen copies are known, with Martin’s copy previously owned by the Third Lanark and Queen’s Park player and Scottish international David Davidson. It has a guide of £500-800.
Scottish Football Association’s Football Annual, 1875-76, estimate £500-800 at Loddon Auctions.
Particularly beautifully produced is the 680-page hardback Llibre D’or del Futbol Catala (The Golden Book of Catalan Football) published 1928. Written in four languages (Catalan, English, French and Spanish) at a time when the success and fame of Barcelona FC was growing, it features many illustrations of teams, players and club badges.
Llibre D’or del Futbol Catala (The Golden Book of Catalan Football) published 1928, estimate £150-200 at Loddon Auctions.
Early club histories vary from the 28-page Fifty Years of the Kilmarnock Football Club 1869-1919 (£100-150) to a copy of The Story of the Celtic in its original dust jacket that is signed by the author Willie Maley and several players including James McGrory and Tommy McInally (£150-250).
Since the early Noughties, Phil Martin has worked with both the National Football Museum in Manchester and the Football Association at Wembley as a volunteer and adviser and has become the FA’s unofficial librarian.
He has also devoted time to recording the printings not mentioned in the book all football collectors know as ‘Seddon’; Peter Seddon’s A Football Compendium: A Comprehensive Guide to the Literature of Association Football. When first issued in 1995, the compendium highlighted to many enthusiasts where the gaps in their collection lay but also encouraged the search for pieces outside this first-ever ‘catalogue raisonné’.
Martin’s Twitter (now X) account is titled @NotinSeddon. Among other things related to the history of the beautiful game, it highlights his many hitherto unrecorded discoveries.
Two examples in the first sale are very early versions of William Shillcock’s Football Annual, a very substantial publication that appears to have run for a decade before First World War.
Shillcock was a Birmingham supplier of sports equipment and contributed to an infamous chapter in FA Cup history when the competition’s first trophy (held by Aston Villa) was stolen from his shop window in September 1895, never to be recovered.
Seddon recorded only one Shillcock annual for the 1912-13 season. Martin’s collection includes six others, including the 272-page 1906-07 annual with its fold-out pictures of the Birmingham City squad and the England team that played Scotland in the Home Championship 1906, and the 304-page, 1907-08 annual with foldouts picturing the local grounds of Villa Park and St Andrews. They will find many admirers at £60-80 each.
Future sales include the book one antiquarian book dealer called ‘the black tulip of football collecting’: the eight-volume set of Football League records privately printed by Billy Johnston, editor of the Arsenal programme from 1931-39, plus what Martin considers “the first proper football book”, Our Winter Game, penned in 1874 by Charles Alcock, the early football administrator and brainchild of the FA Cup who also organised the first test between England and Australia in 1880.
