5 and 5 baseball books with Max Weder
From Eye4Collecting on September 28, 2012, with SABR members Max Weder and Jennifer Ettinger:
5 Questions On Your Collection
1. What do you collect?
My collecting focus is on pre-1970 baseball books, both fiction and non-fiction. As well, I have a strong interest in early Western Canada baseball ephemera.
2. Why do you collect this?
As a child, I had a strong interest in baseball ever since I answered the advertisement for Strat-O-Matic baseball in the back of a comic back (It was either that, or the ad for the amazing sea monkeys). My first contact with baseball books was thus not as a collector, but in purchasing The Sporting News “Batting and Earned Run Averages at a Glance” and “Ready Reckoner” so I could compute averages for my leagues. However, the old-timer Strat-O-Matic cards did inspire an interest in the history of baseball. As a twelve year old, I recall reading Harold Seymour’s first two volumes on the history of baseball, and being amazed by the rich fabric of the game. The other book that was even more enthralling was Robert Peterson’s Only the Ball Was White, the first modern history of the Negro Leagues. As a young boy in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, it was an eye-opener, especially since I only had to that point a vague understanding of Jackie Robinson and what he had accomplished. Finally, I remember the amazing feeling of opening Macmillan’s Baseball Encyclopaedia for the first time in my high school library, and finding full details of the statistics of years long gone by, and for the years of those stars where they did not have a Strat-O-Matic card.
Read the full article here: http://eye4collecting.com/2012/09/28/5-and-5-baseball-books/
Originally published: September 28, 2012. Last Updated: September 28, 2012.