Cleveland Public Library’s baseball collection in the Social Sciences Department includes many early baseball novels. The infancy of American baseball fiction from the Civil War up to 1910 is very well represented in the Library’s collection. The first mention of baseball in fiction is generally credited to Jane Austen, who uses the word in Northanger Abbey:
“[I]t was not very wonderful that Catherine, who had nothing heroic about her, should prefer cricket, base-ball, riding on horseback, and running about the country at the age of fourteen, to books. . . (p.5.)“
Northanger Abbey was drafted during 1797 and 1798, but Jane Austen continued revising and editing it until 1803. Unfortunately, it was not actually published until 1818. Cleveland Public Library’s collection includes one nineteenth century edition of Northanger Abbey.
To welcome the Society of American Baseball Researchers (SABR) and the SABR38 conference, Cleveland Public Library is highlighting baseball history materials with displays of books, photographs, and other treasures. In the Louis Stokes Wing, the Social Sciences Department will feature baseball books and the Photograph Collection will feature baseball photographs. In the Main Building the Fine Arts and Special Collections Department will feature treasures including some of the Mears and Murdock baseball collection scrapbooks. These displays will be in place Monday, June 23rd in anticipation of the Baseball Authors’ Roundtable.
Mears & Murdock Baseball Collections
The foundation of the baseball collection at the Cleveland Public Library is comprised of two outstanding, formerly private collections. In 1944 the Library acquired the baseball collection of Cleveland advertising executive Charles W. Mears (1874-1942). Mears was a young contributing writer to the St. Louis Sporting News when he began a lifelong enthusiasm for baseball information and statistics. He amassed one of the largest baseball libraries in the country, and is recognized as one of the first baseball statisticians.? The Mears Collection contains the daily box scores for a period of approximately 40 years, as well as books on all phases of baseball.? Included are long runs of annuals and periodicals (some dating from 1858), league constitutions, and baseball fiction. For more information about Charles W. Mears please visit this article written by one of our staff members.