Sep 28, 2017 - Sale 2455

Sale 2455 - Lot 252

Unsold
Estimate: $ 400 - $ 600
(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

Additional Details

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 Good Time which George and Frank Had" devoted 11 pages to a ballgame. However, "Changing 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.