Apr 07, 2022 - Sale 2600

Sale 2600 - Lot 226

Price Realized: $ 2,250
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
(SPORTS--BASEBALL.) Porter's Spirit of the Times: A Chronicle of the Turf, Field Sports, Literature and the Stage. Frontispiece equestrian chromolithograph premium in Volume I, numerous engraved illustrations. 104 early issues, each 16 pages: Volumes I-IV complete. 424, 416, 416, 416 pages. Folio, publisher's gilt cloth, moderate wear, Volume I backstrip perished with front board detached, Volume III front board nearly detached; minor wear to contents, intermittent minor dampstaining. New York, 6 September 1856 to August 28 1858

Additional Details

Porter's Spirit of the Times was a general sporting and theatrical weekly, but is best remembered today for its role in recording a critical period during baseball's amateur era. The National Association of Base Ball Players was the first baseball organization to extend beyond a single club, and its birth coincides neatly with the first volume of Porter's. The first hint comes in Volume 1, issue No. 6 (11 October 1856): "It is said that a Convention of all the Base Ball Clubs of this city and suburbs will be held this fall, for the purpose of considering whether any and what amendments to the rules and laws governing this game should be made." A baseball column on 6 December 1856 includes the complete rules of the dominant New York variant of the game, including a diagram of the field, plus a player-by-player review of the pioneering Knickerbocker club. The beleaguered Massachusetts variant is discussed and diagrammed on 27 December 1856. The first baseball convention was reported at length on 31 January 1857, with a patriotic flourish: "Base Ball . . . ought to be looked upon in this country with the same national enthusiasm as Cricket and Foot Ball are regarded in the British Islands. . . . There should be some one game peculiar to the citizens of the United States." This organization can be considered the birth of organized league baseball in America.

Perhaps the high point of the baseball coverage is the 12 September 1857 issue, which features "the earliest illustration of adults playing a baseball match" (Block, page 226). The Eagles and Gothams of New York are shown playing at Hoboken's Elysian Fields. Early stars Jim Creighton of the Niagara club and Harry Wright of the Knickerbockers can often be seen in the box scores by July 1858.

"An important repository of early baseball, including . . . the publication of the first set of rules"--Lomazow 639 and BB1. "In this, the first early heyday of the game, Porter's set such a high standard for baseball coverage that even the legendary Clipper could not, at first, keep up"--Block, Baseball Before We Knew It, page 226.