Billiards, or pool, seems to be a game that leads a kind of double life. For many years in the big cities a pool hall was a place where decent people would never be found. Yet billiards has been a popular game with the aristocracy of the world. Some of the finest homes and clubs have billiard tables in them.

The game is so old that no one can say when it began. There are some authorities who claim it was played in ancient Egypt. The Greeks knew the game as long ago as 400 B.C. In the second century after Christ, a king of Ireland, Catkire More, left behind him “fifty-five billiard balls of brass, with the pools and cues of the same material.” And St. Augustine mentions billiards in his “Confessions,” written in the fifth century.

For some reason, billiards was mentioned by many famous writers during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For example, in Shakespeare’s “Anthony and Cleopatra,” Cleopatra says, “Let us to billiards.”

Did you know that when Mary, Queen of Scots, was kept in prison in 1576, one of her complaints was that her billiard table had been taken away! The first description of billiards in English is to be found in a book called “Compleat Gamester,” by Charles Cotton, published in 1674.

According to some pictures of the game as it was played in those days, there were all kinds of obstacles on the table, such as hoops, and

pegs, and “forts.” The player had to go around or through these obstacles without knocking them down.

About the year 1800, the game became much as we know billiards today. In 1807 a book was published in England—the first English book written about the game—in which billiards is described very much like the modern game.