An apartment to accommodate one table should be of the dimensions following, graduated by the size of the table, and affording space for the free exercise of the cue. Where two or more tables are placed, five feet will be sufficient to allow between them.

Architects, in their plans for modern mansions, should make suitable provision for this amusement, without which no gentleman’s establishment (more especially if a country one) can now be considered perfect. Even if the builder of a house has no taste for the game himself, he should look beforehand, and consider that such an accommodation might form an important item in the price which a succeeding tenant would be willing to pay for it. The light, if possible, should come from above, through ample skylights, so as to bring the table within a general focus, and thus prevent any shadow being thrown from the balls or cushions. The gas-light should be raised about three feet two inches from the bed of the table and supplied with horizontal burners, as by such an arrangement no shadow is cast from the pipe. The distance of the light from the floor should be about 6 feet 1 inch. For a 5×10 table the cross-arms of the pendant should measure from light to light 28 inches, and the long arms 56 inches. For a 4½×9 table, cross-arms 25 inches, and long arms 50 inches. For a 4×8 table, cross-arms 22 inches, and long arms 44 inches. For a 5½×11 table, cross-arms 31 inches, and long arms 62 inches. A useful shade has been devised which throws a soft, even light on the table, and keeps the glare from the player’s eyes. The floor, if carpeted at all, should be covered with some thick, soft material.

Never attempt it. Rather consult with and rely upon reputable manufacturers.

SIZE, SHAPE, AND STYLE.

In this country there are the standard size, which is 5×10 feet, and the popular size, which is 4½×9. Experts use the former, and the latter is preferred in many public rooms and clubs, as well as in most private houses, in the last of which the 4×8 also often finds a place.

Tables are of various styles and shapes, but mostly now without pockets, and with the broad rails at sides and ends beveled, ogee, or square. Those designed for ball-pool have six pockets usually, but sometimes only four. In addition there is the combination billiard-table, meant for both caroms and ball-pool at will.

Beds are of slate, and their tendency is toward greater thickness than was required up to a few years ago. This adds to the general stability of the table. Even for the 6×12, slabs now are often in three pieces, instead of four, thus insuring a smoother playing surface. Heavier slabs should have six legs instead of four, whether the table is 5×10 or larger. Many 4½×9’s have six.

Apart from its cloth and cushions, a table requires no special care beyond treating it similarly to any other piece of furniture, by keeping its framework clean and occasionally applying polish, which can be had of almost any furniture-dealer. When not in use, the table should be well covered up.

THE CLOTH.

There are various kinds and several grades. Buying the best will save money.

Almost invariably, it is the indifferent player or worse who, in or out of public rooms, finds most fault with cushions, balls, cues, leathers, or chalk. The experienced one has learned that usually, when all is not well with him at billiards, the fault is with himself or in his stroke. A less skillful performer will blame the balls when a sagging floor has thrown the table out of level, the table when a ball needs either truing or a holiday, the chalk or the leather when he is wildly throwing his whole body at the ball, and the cushion when diminished speed is really due to the influence of a protracted spell of damp weather upon cloth or ivory. One is sure to absorb moisture, and the other may.

As soon as play is over, and especially in damp weather, the cloth should first be hair-brushed and then whisk-broomed, both processes being with the nap. This, on all tables properly set up, runs in the one direction, although what in America and elsewhere are called “head” and “foot” become “bottom” and “top” in England, an inversion whose effect is to make the grain run the same way in both, the English starting from the bottom. Whether table be pocket or carom, the dust is to be swept out through the two corners farthest from the “string-line,” or “balk,” as it is termed in Canada, India, England and Australia.

Beating with the hair-brush is not advisable. Cloth should not be so long neglected as to need it. The brush spreads in the pounding, and its action is as much against the nap as with it.

THE CUES.

As to both their selection and their care, players should trust to the roomkeeper and his staff. An owner of a private table ought to see that, after play, they are not only kept away from a heater, but are also stood exactly upright in their rack, to prevent warping or crooking. Under-leathers sometimes need sandpapering to overcome expansion. Neglected, they will wear away the nap of the cloth in low-ball “draw-shots,” if not make it picturesque with L-shaped rents, although the usual start of these rents is that the cloth has been minutely punctured either by a hammered cue-ball (massÉ) or by one made acrobatic by an unskillful, thoughtless stroke as it leaves either the cue or the cushion. For slightly roughening the surface of the upper leather, solidifying it, smoothing its edges, and generally “rounding it off” as a finishing touch, a fine rasp is of service; but it should not be used without that instruction which any competent roomkeeper will be glad to give.

It is a habit with a few to chalk both their bridge-hand and the upper half of their cues in muggy weather, thereby befouling their own cloth and that of the table. A wet rag, followed by a dry one, will remove the stickiness.

Cues are made as light as 12 ounces, but those most in demand are from 17 to 22.

Ball-pool, in calling for a somewhat different stroke from that of ordinary caroms, needs a little longer cue.

CUE-LEATHERS.

Self-adhesives, with directions accompanying every box, have made the act of leathering an easy art; but selection is still a science, and here again, until experience has taught the amateur not so much, perhaps, what he needs as what he ought to expect to get, manufacturer or roomkeeper will be the safer guide.

The same counsel will apply to

CHALK.

Most on the market is good. Much is often unspeakably bad. All should be dry, and as free from grease as from grit. It now comes in various shapes—octagon, cylindrical and square. As the colored is labor-saving, few roomkeepers have use for the white. Just as few took to the colored when first brought to notice, nearly forty years ago, although it was made green in order not to show itself upon the cloth.

THE CUSHIONS.

Elasticity, accuracy and durability are their requisites. By elasticity is not meant excessive speed, for a cushion can be made so fast as utterly to baffle the good player without ultimately aiding the bad one who craves it. All other things equal, that cushion is best which is neither radical nor unexpected in its angles, and is least susceptible to ordinary atmospheric changes.

Until their covering begins to wear out in spots, cushions need no other attention than to be lightly brushed when the bed-cloth is cleansed, and every few weeks to have their bolts tightened by the merest turn or fraction. Should the bolts be overlooked too long, the cushion itself, by emitting a jingling sound, will give notice that a shrinkage in wood or metal calls for carpenter’s bit-and-brace.

The height of the top of the modern cushion-rail from the floor, if level, may be roundly expressed as thirty-four inches, and that of the cushion’s knife-like edge from the bed is one and seven-sixteenths inches. This is for the regulation American and French ball, which, at one-quarter of an inch above its centre, comes into contact with the cushion’s edge. Struck with force, a much larger ball would jump over the cushion, while a much smaller, jamming itself between table’s bed and cushion’s edge, would jump inwardly.

Cushions must be tuned to balls. Unless the former have a given height and pitch, there cannot be accurate reflection, and there may be inaccurate stroke. Height has already been discussed. Pitch is the inward slant of the cushion’s top surface as a guide to the cue in certain situations.

THE MAGIC BALLS.

With balkline the vogue, as much depends upon balls, cloth and cushions as upon the player himself.

Balls should be of well-seasoned ivory, and the only available guarantee as to that is the ability of manufacturers to carry a heavy stock.

There are players who talk of perfect balls, but a well-turned ball is the limit, and neither its truing-up nor its recoloring should ever be intrusted to other than an artisan of conceded skill and experience. Earth has never known an absolutely round sphere or a perfectly smooth plane. Under the glare of a chemical light, lens and screen will show hills and valleys in both.

Requiring much patience and much ivory, matching balls is an art in itself. The lower end of a tusk is too small for carom balls, and the upper and larger too hollow. Perhaps six balls, on an average, can be shaped out of the central section. The ball toward the smaller end is closer-grained than any of its companions, all of which, while of the one size, may differ in other respects from one another. Possibly out of twenty tusks not fifty balls will be found approximately equal, in sets of three, with respect to weight and centralized gravity. As sets, they may all differ from one another, notwithstanding that any one set is fit for ordinary use; and for an important match the whole twenty tusks are liable not to turn out three balls alike in size, weight and central gravity.

The best and dearest ivory is the rarest—the worst, of course, is cheapest. Some tusks, as they grow, acquire more moisture than others. The dentine in the millions of little cells is greater in one tusk than in another. When it comes to billiard-balls, what the animal fed upon up to from ten to twenty years of age, and also where it fed, are no inconsiderable factors, could we find them out. Some tusks partly season by sun-drying as they grow, their owners having to trot long distances for water. Other elephants rear themselves where water is abundant, but sunshine scarce. There would also seem to be more durability in the detached tusk than in balls made from it. The writer has a match-set he knows to be at least twenty-three years old, that have never been returned, and that have not had their cardboard box opened in nearly twenty years. What will happen to them if put on table? Within four hundred feet of where they rest, the set used in the Phelan-Seereiter match fell to pieces, in 1867, as soon as played with. As souvenirs they had lain idle eight years. In Paris, some years later, professors engaged in a series of games with a set from a tusk (that of a mammoth) presumably thousands of years old. Until told the players had no idea but that those balls were from a modern elephant, born and despoiled within their own lifetime.

In view of all this, is it any wonder either that manufacturers decline to guarantee ivory or that man to-day knows no more about it and its care than was known two hundred years ago?

Heat is a greater foe to balls than cold. The latter is not an abstract, positive quality or condition, being merely the absence of heat. Could excessive warmth be guarded against as to billiard-balls, there would be little reason to dread the chilly draught. At the outset, balls need to be much larger in hot climates than in cold. We in America murmur, and yet billiards, both social and spectacular, is played in countries where heat and moisture will change every new set from sphere to spheroid within a month.

Balls usually do their prettiest freaks across the grain, but sometimes do them with the grain. Those that swell under the influence of moisture will occasionally, if allowed to remain idle for months, resume their proper form automatically; but in a large majority of cases truing-up is the only cure. Balls that crack will be helped to heal, like human lips that chap, by touching them somewhat sparingly with tallow. Neither rubbing balls with oil nor storing them in sawdust saturated with it is recommended. There are countries having peculiarly evaporative traits in which oil has been proved a blessing, but in this climate tallow for cracks and sawdust without oil are about the limit of cure and prevention.

Balls should never be placed on or near a heater. Modern artificial warmth is ivory’s direst enemy. Roomkeepers meet with fewer mishaps as to balls when their places are heated by stoves. Those fresh from play, especially in hot rooms, should not be placed on metal or stone, nor even on wood near door or window. Metal and stone are no colder than the room itself, although feeling colder to the touch; but they have a wonderful capacity for stealing heat from other things and giving it away in space, to suck in more. Nor should balls be put at once into an iron safe. Their play has been work, and there can be no work without generating inside heat. The old way was to put them up on a shelf in the open room. The box might have a lid, but there would be holes in it the year round. The fire would go out slowly and early, and zero might come after midnight, but the balls would be there at 8 A.M. sharp. Nails in the floor worried the old-timers, with their self-ventilating balls, more than heat or cold.

It was their fashion, too, never to put new balls in play at once. No matter how well-seasoned ivory is in point of age, it is practically nowhere riper than in its greenest part. Consequently a ball pared in spots in returning is virtually a new ball throughout in proffering the atmosphere new access to its interior. Were new balls put upon the table every day for two or three weeks, after the chill is off the room, and merely toyed with, without ever being struck with anything like force, they would probably give better and longer service.

A private table should have two sets of balls, and public rooms not fewer than three sets to every two carom tables.

As soon as play is done, the balls should be wiped off with a moist cloth, and then dried and polished with one of wool or chamois, so fine as not to scratch.

Composition balls have advantages besides their cheapness, but the demand for them continues to be almost confined in this country to ball-pool. The prejudice against them for caroms is still, as it was thirty-six years ago, that they are not ivory. The interval has greatly improved them, however, and this year’s promise of “absolute perfection” may at least result in coming closer to it than ever before.

The match-standard American carom-ball, always of ivory, is of 2? diameter, with the red no larger than the whites. Standard ones for ordinary use are, when new, either 2? full or 27
16 scant.