Thorn: ‘The Krank,’ a look at baseball’s rarest book
From SABR member John Thorn at Our Game on August 10, 2015:
In baseball literature, this little book–sixty-four pages, dimensions two inches by two-and-a-half inches, printed on “blood parchment” and “bound in the skin of a baseball”–is the rarest of the rare. The New York Public Library has a copy, and so does the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library. Three other copies appear to exist, also held by institutions, and another, the sixth, was sold at auction nine years ago. Its author is Thomas William Lawson, who would go on to fame as a wizard of Wall Street, but who at this time was the manager of a troubled publishing firm in Boston, Rand Avery Company, which printed the book and sold it to the public for twenty-five cents.
The Krank: His Language and What It Means is a humorous glossary of baseball terms. Many of these are highly picturesque to the modern imagination (a strikeout is “cutting a hole in space,” “ smashing the wind,” or “compressing the atmosphere”). Others are fascinating for their etymological clues. What we today call a “pop fly,” for instance, is defined and depicted as a pot fly–the household insect that traces lazy circles over a steaming pot in the kitchen.
Read the full article here: http://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2015/08/10/the-krank-baseballs-rarest-book/
Originally published: August 10, 2015. Last Updated: August 10, 2015.