Customer Reviews

The New Illustrated Encyclopedia of Billiards: Completely Revised and Updated

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This is a *great* reference on the terminology, history, and facts of pool, billiards, snooker and other cue sports, written by the curator of the Billiard Archive (i.e., he knows what he's talking about.) Stein & Rubino's "The Billiard Encyclopedia" is much larger, but the works are complementary. Shamos's is an alphabetical glossary, not unlike Britannica's "Micropedia", while the S&R volume (now in its 3rd edition) is a sprawling narrative, divided into topical chapters (history of the sport, cuemaking, etc.) I can't recommend them both enough. The Shamos book is a "workhorse" reference (unlike S&R beautiful coffee table book) - it's purpose is looking up billiards terminology. This revised version is a substantive improvement on the original (and beware: that edition has been published under multiple titles by different publishers). The trade paperback version is more affordable than the hardback, but I'm really happy to have the hardback version; I would have thrashed a softcover with overuse by now. Shamos, a regular "Billiards Digest" history columnist is a hardcore researcher, and digs up really fascinating bits of information both in his column every months and in massive quantities in this book.

I cannot imagine what could be added to this book to make it better. It has everything a person would want or need to know about Billiards.