A beautifully preserved example of the true first edition of the "first novel devoted exclusively to baseball" (Grobani 12-2c). This alone makes it a landmark in American literary and sports history — a cornerstone document in a genre that would eventually produce a rich tradition of baseball fiction.

The story begins when two teams from different sides of the track start a game. The town fathers decide to sponsor a team, putting together the best players from both sides, bringing in others and beginning to pay them on a scale so that most are professionals. The Catalpa team eventually wins the state championship, and the star from the wrong side of the tracks makes it as a lawyer on the good side of town. This arc — using baseball as a vehicle for social mobility and community-building — reflects the idealistic role the sport was already playing in the American imagination in the Gilded Age.

The author, Noah Brooks, was far more than a children's book writer. He was an American journalist and editor who worked for newspapers in Sacramento, San Francisco, Newark, and New York, and is known for writing a major biography of Abraham Lincoln based on close personal observation. His connection to Lincoln was intimate: after the death of his wife in 1862, Brooks moved to Washington, D.C. to cover the Lincoln administration for the Sacramento Daily Union, and was accepted into the Lincoln household as an old friend — scholar Michael Burlingame describes him as "a kind of surrogate son to the president." He had even been scheduled to join the president's staff as a personal secretary, though he never did — and his observations of Lincoln in the White House are now considered an irreplaceable glimpse of the Civil War president's humanity.

That Brooks — one of the most significant Lincoln intimates and a serious man of letters who mingled with Mark Twain and Bret Harte — turned his hand to writing the first baseball novel says a great deal about the cultural stature baseball had achieved by 1884.

The introduction by Albert Goodwill Spalding also adds historical weight. At the time of publication, Spalding was identified as being "of the Chicago Base Ball Club." He was already one of the most powerful figures in professional baseball — a former star pitcher, the owner of the Chicago White Stockings, and co-founder of the sporting goods empire that bore his name. In his introduction, Spalding noted that given how strong a hold baseball had upon the American people, it was surprising that more frequent use of the game as a framework had not been made by writers of fiction, and he endorsed the book as a work that would "commend itself to every lover of pure and wholesome literature." Having Spalding introduce the first baseball novel was roughly equivalent to having the commissioner of baseball endorse it — it signaled the sport's establishment blessing for the project of embedding baseball in American literary culture.

This first edition features ten full-page wood-engraved illustrations and has been issued in pictorial cloth. It is considered a cornerstone of any baseball fiction collection.

[Baseball] Brooks, Noah. Al Spalding [Intro. Albert Spalding of the Chicago White Stockings / White Sox]. Our Base Ball Club and How it Won the Championship. New York. E. P. Dutton and Company. 1884. 202pp.

Very good condition, black and gold embossed spine and front cover generally crisp and bright with some moderate dulling, moreso to spine, a small stain, and corners are a bit soft and through the cloth as shown. Text itself is very crisp and clean with only the lightest of foxing. A single, neat period inscription on the ffep.