Collecting Sporting Books

"I always turn to the sports pages first, which record people's accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man's failures."
--Chief Justice Earl Warren



When the wintry winds blow and the sports lover is confined indoors, there can be no better solace than a fine library of sporting books to pore through. Whether one's passion is baseball, fishing, hunting, golf or other outdoor pursuits, the long affinity that book lovers have had for sports is attested to by the range and quality of books available in these areas. Three sports in particular have had, and continue to have, a particularly propitious relationship with literature: angling, golf and baseball.



In the words of the eminent collector Dean Sage, "It is beyond question that Angling literature is in quality, as perhaps in quantity, greatly superior to that in any other area of sport." The standard for angling literature was set in 1653 with the first edition of Isaac Walton and James Cotton's The Compleat Angler. This wonderful work, set in dialogue form, has since appeared in hundreds of editions, including the first American in 1847, and a fine collection can be formed based on this title alone. While many fine manuals appeared throughout the 18th century as the popularity of the sport continued to increase, the next truly revolutionary work on the subject was Alfred Ronalds The Fly Fisher's Entomology in 1836. Ronald's classification system of flies continues to influence the sport and paved the way for other classic works such as Frederic Halford's Dry Fly Entomology, best obtained in the spectacular De Luxe signed limited first edition, featuring 100 actual mounted flies. The nineteenth century brought angling literature to full flowering and the works of Sir Humphrey Davy, William Scrope and W.C.Stewart as well as G. P. R. Pulman's important work on dry-fly fishing The Vade-Mecum of Fly-Fishing for Trout are well worth seeking out. This century also saw the birth of angling literature in the United States with the publication of two important works: Jerome Smith's 1833 "Natural History of the Fishes of Massachusetts", the first essay appearing in print in the U. S. and the American Angler's Guide of 1845 being the first book devoted to the subject. The relatively late development of American angling literature makes any work on the subject published in the U. S. during the nineteenth century an attractive item, particularly works by such giants as Thaddeus Norris and Theodore Gordon, from whom "the tendencies of American flytying largely stem" (McDonald)." Since this time fine angling literature has flowed equally from American and British writers, two of the masters of the twentieth century include John Mottram and G. E. M. Skues. Also worth noting are the stunning plate books produced on fish and fishing, particularly William Houghton's British Fresh-Water Fishes (1879) and George Goode's Game Fishes of the United States (1879-1880). An excellent guide to the literature available is Arnold Gingrich's Fishing in Print.



The origins of the game of golf are murky, its history muddied even further by the fact that references to it in print do not crop up until long after the game first became popular. The first known reference is from the laws and acts of the Scottish parliament, enacted in 1457 but not printed until 1566. Here "… It is ordaynt and decreyt… that ye futbawe and ye golf be utterly cryt done and not usyt." Many years passed before the appearance of Thomas Mathison's The Goff in 1743, the first poem devoted to golf, and many more years passed before Henry B. Farnie produced the first book containing golf instruction in 1857. As the popularity of golf was spurred by the introduction of the gutta-percha and later the rubber core ball, as well as the creation of numerous clubs in America, both the literature and the game witnessed an explosion of popularity at the end of the nineteenth century, and any works produced at this time or in the early twentieth century are desirable. 1893 saw the appearance of the first golfing publication in America (Balfour's pamphlet The Golfer's Manual, appearing in the Spalding Athletic Library) as well as the first golfing novel in English, M. A. Stobart's Won at the Last Hole. James P. Lee's Golf in America, the first book on golf published in America, appeared in 1895, and 1896 saw the publication of Willie Park Jr.'s The Game of Golf, the first book by a professional golfer. Other notable works of this time include Horace Hutchinson's first book, Hints on the Game of Golf, as well as his classic Golf, which appeared as part of the Badminton Library of Sports and Pastimes. Women finally began to be heard from with the publication of Mrs. Edward Kennard's The Sorrows of a Golfer's Wife in 1896 and golfers such as Glenna Collett (Ladies in the Rough), Joyce Wethered and Babe Didrikson have contributed interesting and desirable works. The tradition of fine writing on golf has continued and flourished in the twentieth century, upheld by such writers as Bernard Darwin, Herbert Warren Wind and Michael Murphy, who produced the closest thing to a classic in golf fiction, Golf in the Kingdom. It was Wind who stated that "no other game has a literature that compares with golf's" in his introduction to Donovan & Murdoch's comprehensive bibliography The Game of Golf and the Printed Word 1566-1985. Perhaps somewhere he and Dean Sage have figured out a way to settle the matter without bloodshed.



In modern times baseball has produced much of the finest writing on sport, including the works of Roger Angell, Lawrence Ritter, Eliot Asinof and Roger Kahn, as well as fine fictional works such as Bernard Malamud's The Natural, Mark Harris' Bang the Drum Slowly and The Southpaw, and Philip Roth's The Great American Novel. All of these works continue to be highly collectible as well as wonderful reading. But for the true fan of the sport, nothing could be more fascinating than exploring the origins and evolution of the game through early printed material, reliving the debates over rule changes and techniques as well as such issues as player salaries, gambling, designated hitters and umpiring that still resonate today. The earliest references to baseball are obscure and very scarce, but a body of literature began to emerge in the 1860's when rules and leagues began to gain their current structure. Particularly interesting from this early period are instructional guides and references in works for children such as the American Boy's Book of Sports and Games, appearing in 1864. 1860 saw the first appearance of Beadle's Dime Baseball Player, the first baseball guide sold to the public and edited by Henry Chadwick, "The Father of Baseball." Chadwick went on to edit for many years the popular Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide, first published in 1876. Collecting guides such as these, including Reach's Official American League Base Ball Guide, first published in 1883 and perhaps the most complete statistically, is a wonderful way to trace the development of the game. By the turn of the century, many involved in baseball felt the need to preserve (and sometimes rewrite) the origins of the game and some of the first histories of baseball began to appear, notably Jacob Morse's rare Sphere and Ash in 1888, Seymour Church's Baseball, 1845-1871 in 1902, Alfred Spink's The National Game in 1910, Patten & McFadden's The Book of Baseball, 1911, and A.G. Spalding's compendious though jingoistic Our National Game, 1911, instrumental in institutionalizing the Doubleday myth of the origins of baseball. Baseball began to appear in fictional works as early as the 1860's, but most early works are valuable as curiosities more than great works of literature, tending toward didactic juvenile literature or, in the early twentieth century, works ghost-written for then-current stars, such as Christy Mathewson's numerous works, or those of Frank Chance or Babe Ruth (The Home-run King, or How Pep Pindar Won His Title, 1920). Players' accounts of their baseball memories date from "King" Kelly's Play Ball in 1888 and continue to be popular. Signed copies of these works are particularly desirable, but this collecting field has been plagued by fraudulent items and one should always buy from a reputable source.



If one's interests lean toward other sports, there are certainly items worth pursuing. In such modern sports as American football and basketball their origins are recent enough that one can still seek out some of the earliest appearances of references in print, one of the most interesting being Walter Camp's American Football (1891). Polo, fencing and all of the field sports such as hunting, falconry and fowling all have established bodies of literature available in handsome editions. One might particularly seek out the sporting novels of Robert Surtees as well as the general sporting works of Robert Williamson, Frank Forester and the far-ranging outdoorsman Theodore Roosevelt.



Whatever sport is choses, one can quickly establish a satisfying collection, which beyond the joys of the hunt, will provide hours of reading pleasure, a pleasure which can perhaps approach the level of enjoyment one feels when participating in or watching one's favorite sport. And if this should seem too passive, remember the words of the great collector and bookseller A. S. W. Rosenbach, "After love, book collecting is the most exhilarating sport of all."