Little is known about William Spooner beyond this work here offered in the first edition of 1842 and another similar game he published in 1844 on England and Wales. This rare and attractive educational game was to be played as lotto, each player moving around the map. Players begin from separate cities and race to a designated city. Tokens are collected or lost on the way, the winner collecting everybody’s tokens. It is lithographed by W. Clerk and fully illustrated with vignettes of European towns, life and fauna. Games of this nature are particularly rare as they are so easily subject to damage over time. There was a later edition published in 1852. “The first known dated game [in England] is ‘A Journey through Europe’, produced by the geographer John Jefferys in September 1759. This was to set the pattern for map games for the next eighty years, although it seems to have been over a decade before the idea was first copied by anyone else … In these games … the geometrical arrangement of the course has been replaced by a track meandering across the surface of a map, punctuated by numbered stopping-places at various cities or other places of interest” (Hill). Provenance: private English collection. Hill (1978) pp. 7-14. Not in the BL.