Baseball Card Book Review - Game Faces Early Baseball Card From the Library of Congress by Peter Devereaux

I have been reading quite a bit of non-fiction lately which is somewhat of a change for me.  I would typically intersperse a non-fiction book into every 5-6 books I read but lately it has turned around and I am probably at about 2:1 in favor of non-fiction.  A lot of the fiction I read is mystery/action/suspense like James Patterson, Nelson DeMille, Jonathan Kellerman, John Grisham and perhaps my interests are changing as they aren't keeping my interest.  My favorite author is Stephen King and while I enjoy his books, the last few I have to read are super long and tackling an 800-1000 page book just seems a little overwhelming.

Luckily there are tons of great history and sports themed books out there to keep me occupied and I finished a pretty good one last weekend that I thought I would share, it features baseball cards - what could be better!

I really enjoyed this read, it is a history of baseball and tobacco cards from about 1887-1914.  This is a book that was published by Smithsonian Books in partnership with the Library of Congress and features photos of tobacco cards from the collection of Benjamin K. Edwards.  Edwards collected a wide variety of tobacco cards and had a collection of over 12,000 cards when he passed away in 1943.  They were gifted to a family friend, poet Carl Sandburg, upon his death.  In 1954 Sandburg donated the collection to the Library of Congress so that it could be preserved and future generations could appreciate it.

The baseball cards from this collection are featured in this book and shared along with a good US History lesson around the late 19th and early 20th century with a focus on the tobacco industry.  I learned quite a bit but the best part of the book is definitely the pictures of a bunch of cards from the famous T206, set to some famous sets that have been recently reprinted like Gypsy Queen and Allen & Ginter to rare sets that I had never heard of or seen like Fatima Team Cards and Buchner Gold Coin.

This book was published in 2018 and I picked up this copy on loan from my local library.  It is about 150 pages and a pretty quick and fun read.  I would definitely recommend it.