Peg Solitaire : Extracts from Mercure Galant, August and September 1697 (John, May 2013)
Dic Sonneveld has drawn my attention to a Wikipedia reference to Mercure Galant, August 1697, pages 88-134, which predates anything I cited in The Ins and Outs and appears to have been the first reference to Peg Solitaire in print. He has sent me a link
and also
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k62592187/f58.image
which gives some further material which appeared in the volume for September 1697 (pages 59-84). However, the resulting downloads are in a somewhat inconvenient form (the material sprawls over more than seventy pages, each holding no more than 15-17 lines of text), and in view of the importance of this material to the history of Peg Solitaire I have made a transcription of it as an eight-page PDF with diagrams.
To download this transcription, click here.
These and subsequent issues of Mercure Galant appear to be in the British Library, and if any reader cares to search them for further references to Peg Solitaire I shall be very pleased to report his findings here, or to draw attention to them once they have been reported elsewhere.
In the meantime, thank you, Dic, for bringing this historically important material to my attention.