Beautiful richly illustrated monograph on the most widespread sporting recreations and the most popular games played from antiquity to the end of the 19th century, their origins and history: toys, card games, chess, dice, board games, sporting games and sports proper, up to to the beginnings of motoring; all accompanied by a very rich iconographic documentation that draws extensively on period documentation: prints, paintings, watercolours, photographs. Gaston Vuiller (1846-1915) was a brilliant writer and illustrator, watercolorist and landscape painter. He collaborated on numerous illustrated magazines of the late nineteenth century.