Baseball Collecting Books: Book 2, from 1993 -- and a bonus project from 1979

A couple of days ago, I mentioned that I had found a couple of older books on baseball card collecting -- one from 1979 and one from 1993.  The 1993 book reminded me why I stopped paying attention to baseball card collecting, while the 1979 book reminded me why I started in the first place.

To remember the fun of 1979, here's another fun Junk Wax project for anyone who may still use spiral notebooks.  To be fair, I had enough of Mario Soto's card from 1978 to make a Mario Soto notebook...

Do spiral notebooks still exist in this day of the electronic notebook/tablet?  Well, maybe you can use your junk wax to protect the back of your iPad/Kindle/Android/etc,.

Then there was the 1993 book, The Grand Slam Collection: Have Fun Collecting Baseball Cards by Jerry Ford (2d printing 1993, Lerner Pub. Co.).

By "Have Fun", I think the author means, "How make sure that trying to trade baseball cards with your friends will mean you end up with no friends."  That may sound a little harsh, but, for example, here's the introduction:

Now, as I said, this book reminded me why I stopped collecting cards about 25 years ago.  It's not that it is inaccurate in any way -- it is just that there are so many reminders throughout the book to the middle-school kids to whom the book was targeted that everyone in life literally is out to get them and cannot be trusted.

For example:

Or:

Or:

Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they aren't after you.

I am not trying to be a Pollyanna about the current state of the hobby in any way.  I am sure that there are still nefarious companies and dealers on the market who would consider picking through sets, lifting one or two cards, and trying to sell it as a complete set.  I don't know of any personally.  In this age of fairly instant information sharing, though, and in this age of declining revenues for card makers and local card shops alike, one would think that dealers would be less likely to bite the hands that are feeding them.

Has anyone encountered such skullduggery these days?  (Please don't name names, though.  No one needs a lawsuit for something like that.)

The View on Collecting in 1979

Before I get into this post, I hope you like the clean-up and redesign here at Hiatus HQ.  I like to tinker with things from time to time.

This morning through my job, a group of us volunteered to sort through donated books which were to be sent to various African schools and libraries through the charity Books for Africa.  When libraries determine that a book has reached the end of its useful life, or when colleges and secondary schools change editions of their books, the old books get donated to organizations such as Books for Africa.  BfA then sorts through what still has use to people in Africa -- whether children's storybooks or multiple copies of  the books making up the snooze-worthy chick-flick series of "The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants" -- and recycles the rest.

Two of the reasons a book would get recycled are either that the book is too old -- really nothing before 1999 unless it's a classic, a novel, or a children's book -- or is too "American" in nature.  I came across two books that otherwise would have been recycled that are entirely appropriate for us as baseball card collectors.  I'll talk about one today.

The first is called "Sports Cards: Collecting, Trading, and Playing" by Margo McLoone and Alice Siegel (Holt, Rinehart & Winston (NY) 1979):

This book was written for a target audience of third through sixth graders, roughly.  This book is packed with interestingly dated information which I will try to remember to share every so often.  But the section that really made me laugh was the final section:

For nearly as long as I have been collecting, people have talked about keeping cards in good condition.  I personally never heard of the idea of putting a baseball card inside your hat when it loses its shape, but it's a new and exciting way to fold, spindle, or mutilate cards.

Of course, the projects that the authors encourage kids to try all completely destroy the cards being used. The one that made me really want to go back in time and save the cards from these projects, though, is the Sports Picture Collage.  Since Pete Rose "wrote"/allowed his facsimile autograph to be affixed under the foreword, he was the featured superstar in the collage:

If that were just laying loosely, I wouldn't cringe.  Here's the instructions with my highlighting for effect:

Perhaps this is what we should all start doing with our favorite junk wax cards -- for those plays at the plate, bunters, pitchers hitting, or what have you!  Actually, that sounds like a fun afternoon...