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.