Sale 2455 - Printed & Manuscript Americana, September 28, 2017

250 250 c   (SPORTS.) The Play Ground; or, Out-Door Games for Boys. Numerous illustrations. 4, [11]-120 pages as issued, plus [5] and [27] pages of publisher’s advertisements including endpapers. 12mo, publisher’s cloth-backed pictorial boards, minor wear; internally clean. NewYork: Dick & Fitzgerald, [1866] [300/400] 10 pages are devoted to baseball,“which is Rounders, or Town Ball, reduced to a system, and governed by scientific rules . . . and bids fair to become to this country what cricket is to England—the national game” (page 83). 251 c   (SPORTS—BASEBALL.) Ellard, Harry. Base Ball in Cincinnati: A History. 52 plates and 6 full-page illustrations, all counted in pagination. 249 pages. 4to, gilt pictorial cloth, minor wear and soiling; minimal finger-soiling; one of 500 copies (unnumbered); early owner’s signature on front free endpaper. Cincinnati, OH, 1907 [700/1,000] Most of the book is dedicated to the original Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1866-1870, often cited as the first professional club, which went undefeated for 1869 and much of 1870.The author drew on the original records of the club, as his father had been a founding member. 252 c   (SPORTS—BASEBALL.) Everett,William. Changing Base; or, What Edward Rice Learned at School. 4 plates. 282 pages. 8vo, publisher’s cloth, moderate wear, cocked; minor foxing. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1869 [400/600] Second edition, first published in 1868.Declaring any book to be “the first baseball novel” is a matter of semantics, but Changing Base is frequently awarded that title. James Fenimore Cooper’s 1838 “Home as Found” contains a brief description of casual ballplaying, and Alfred Oldfellow’s 1865 “Uncle Nat; or,The GoodTime which George and Frank Had” devoted 11 pages to a ballgame. However,“Chang- ing Base” (written by the son of famed congressman Edward Everett) featured almost three full chapters on baseball, and was the first novel to include an illustration of a baseball game. Oddly enough, some grown men still debate whether sliding on the basepaths was an accepted practice in the 1860s.This novel’s hero “hurled himself at full length on the base” on page 164, and the facing illustration clearly depicts a head-first slide. “The first novel to describe an actual baseball game”— Schraufnagel,The Baseball Novel, page 3. 252