American Memory: Spalding Base Ball Guides, 1889-1939

The Library of Congress's American Memory Web announced the release of a new online collection "Spalding Base Ball Guides, 1889-1939." [BTW, do a search across the whole American Memory website and you'll find hundred's of photographs of amateur, college, and professional baseball teams. It's facinating.]

Spalding Base Ball Guides, 1889-1939" comprises a historic selection of Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide and the Official Indoor Base Ball Guide. The collection reproduces 35 of the guides, which were published by the Spalding Athletic Company in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide was perhaps the premier publication of its day for the game of baseball. It featured editorials from baseball writers on the state of the game, statistics, photographs, and analysis of the previous season for all the Major League teams and for many of the so-called minor leagues across the nation.

The Library of Congress has more than one thousand of these guides, believed to be the largest collection held by any institution. A small sample is offered here in "Spalding Base Ball Guides, 1889-1939"; in the future, the entire collection may be digitized and made available on this Web site. The twenty Official Indoor Baseball Guides and fifteen Spalding's Official Base Ball Guides currently presented are examples of the annual guides described above.

Posted by Tom on April 26, 2004