Baseball; A Comprehensive Bibliography

xvii, [1], 915, [3] pages. The cover has slight wear and soiling. A few ink marks around some entries noted. No dust jacket present. Frontispiece. Foreword by Fred Claire. Foreword by David Quentin Voigt. Preface by Thomas R. Heitz. Author Index. Subject Index. Over 20,000 entries: the long awaited exhaustive work. There is no aspect not covered-major, minor, defunct, college, little leagues, bat factories, ballplayer bios (over one third of the book). Every non-newspaper U.S./Canadian item published from 1840 to 1984-360 periodicals alone. Thorough subject and author indexing. Myron J. Smith, Jr., was the director of the library and professor of library science and history at Tusculum College in Greeneville, Tennessee. He was the author or compiler of numerous works on modern military history, sports and other topics of keen public interest. Derived from The Library Journal: This is the most comprehensive bibliography of baseball literature available, updating and expanding Anton Grobani's Guide to the Literature of Baseball (1975). The 21,000 citations are arranged by subject classifications. There are sections on the World Series, baseball cards, business aspects, the minor leagues, each of the teams, and a biographical section covering those connected with the game. Annotations are provided for many entries. There is an author index, title index, and information on obtaining difficult to locate material, including addresses. This work by a professional bibliographer will be the cornerstone of baseball research for a long time to come--Dennis Dillon, University of Texas Libraries at Austin. Bibliography, as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology. English author and bibliographer John Carter describes bibliography as a word having two senses: one, a list of books for further study or of works consulted by an author (or enumerative bibliography); the other one, applicable for collectors, is "the study of books as physical objects" and "the systematic description of books as objects" (or descriptive bibliography). Bibliography is a specialized aspect of library science (or library and information science, LIS) and documentation science. It was established by a Belgian, named Paul Otlet (1868-1944), who was the founder of the field of documentation, as a branch of the information sciences, who wrote about "the science of bibliography." One of the first bibliographers was Conrad Gessner who sought to list all books printed in Latin, Greek and Hebrew in Bibliotheca Universalis (1545). Fredson Bowers described and formulated a standardized practice of descriptive bibliography in his Principles of Bibliographical Description (1949). Scholars to this day treat Bowers' scholarly guide as authoritative. In this classic text, Bowers describes the basic function of bibliography as, "[providing] sufficient data so that a reader may identify the book described, understand the printing, and recognize the precise contents". Baseball has had a broad impact on popular culture, both in the United States and elsewhere. Dozens of English-language idioms have been derived from baseball. The first networked radio broadcasts in North America were of the 1922 World Series: famed sportswriter Grantland Rice announced play-by-play from New York City's Polo Grounds on WJZ-Newark, New Jersey, which was connected by wire to WGY-Schenectady, New York, and WBZ-Springfield, Massachusetts. The baseball cap has become a ubiquitous fashion item not only in the United States and Japan, but also in countries where the sport itself is not particularly popular, such as the United Kingdom. Baseball has inspired many works of art and entertainment. One of the first major examples, Ernest Thayer's poem "Casey at the Bat", appeared in 1888. A wry description of the failure of a star player in what would now be called a "clutch situation", the poem became the source of vaud.