The Library of Congress is pleased to announce the release of a
new online collection: "Spalding Base Ball Guides, 1889-1939."
The collection is within the Library's American Memory Web site:
<http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/spaldinghtml/>.

"Spalding Base Ball Guides, 1889-1939" comprises a historic
selection of Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide and the Official
Indoor Base Ball Guide.  The collection reproduces thirty-five
of the guides, which were published by the Spalding Athletic
Company in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Spalding's Official Base Ball Guide was perhaps the premier
publication of its day for the game of baseball.  It featured
editorials from baseball writers on the state of the game,
statistics, photographs, and analysis of the previous season
for all the Major League teams and for many of the so-called
minor leagues across the nation.

The Library of Congress has more than one thousand of these
guides, believed to be the largest collection held by any
institution.  A small sample is offered here in "Spalding Base
Ball Guides, 1889-1939";  in the future, the entire collection may
be digitized and made available on this Web site.  The twenty
Official Indoor Baseball Guides and fifteen Spalding's Official
Base Ball Guides currently presented are examples of the
annual guides described above.

American Memory is a gateway to rich primary source materials
relating to the history and culture of the United States. Its more
than 120 collections range from the papers of the U.S. presidents,
Civil War photographs and early films of Thomas Edison to
papers documenting the women's suffrage and civil rights
movements, Jazz Age photographs and the first baseball cards.
The collections contain over 8 million items from the Library of
Congress and other major repositories.

Please direct all questions to the American Memory Team,
using the web form available at:
<http://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/ask-memory2.html>.