The Brick Row Book Shop

Baseball in 1849

[BABCOCK, SIDNEY, ATTRIBUTED AUTHOR].

Juvenile Pastimes; or, Girls' and Boys' Book of Sports.

Place and Imprint: New Haven: Published by S. Babcock, 1849.
Edition: Probably the first edition of the text, but this is a work highly derivative of earlier works.
Bibliographical References: Block, Baseball Before We Knew it, page 212; not in Rosenbach "Early American Children's Books," which does describe similar titles, but none that precisely meet the description of this one.
Condition: Some slight wear and foxing; very good copy.
Book ID: 26055

Physical Description

16mo (11 x 7 cm), original green pictorial wrappers, stitched as issued,16 pages. Vignette-title, six full-page woodcuts and ten vignettes in the text. Publisher's ads on the rear wrapper. The upper wrapper is dated 1850 and the title-page is dated 1849, as in all recorded copies.

Comments

A chapbook of descriptions of popular games for children, including marbles, skipping rope, tag, kite-flying, see-saw, archery, and most prominently playing ball: "There are a great number of games played with Balls, of which Base-Ball, Trap-Ball, Cricket, Up-Ball, Catch-Ball, and Drive Ball, are the most common." Two of the illustrations depict ball players. There were several works similar to this one in the preceding decade, but they described different games, and this one is important for its relatively early reference to "base-ball."

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