Thursday, November 20, 2014

Baseball Amusement Machines - part 2

This post was originally published on September 25, 2010, at my Mark's Ephemera blog.

Another set of ads for Amusement Machines from the page of Billboard, via Google Books.  Again, from the 1950s.  Compare and contrast from the previous blog post.




















Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Baseball Amusement Machines

This post was originally published on September 18, 2010, at my Mark's Ephemera blog.

Google Books has again loosed its baseball goodness upon me. Looking through an April 21, 1958 issue of Billboard magazine I stumbled across the Amusement Machines section. What did I find? Baseball games. So I looked around at some different issues of Billboard. More games. These are all from the 1950s. I've tried to match up the press release or news article with an ad for the game. I'm sure that there are still several games that I did not find.























I've got a second installment of these waiting for another post. Don't go far.

Thursday, November 13, 2014

Illustrations from "How To Play Baseball"

In the facebook group, Baseball Books, there was a discussion about How To Play Baseball.  A question was asked, "How is it illustrated?"  I assumed that the book being discussed was John McGraw's 1914 How To Play Baseball: A Manual For Boys.  It wasn't.  It was about the 1913 book of the same title by "The Greatest Baseball Players".

I found a copy of the McGraw book on Google Books and extracted the illustrations.  It doesn't answer the original question, but since I didn't want the illustrations to go to waste, I present them here.

The title page states that there are 32 illustrations.  I didn't find that many, just 23.  It appears that Google has clipped some of the photos and they are available if you purchase the book, not just download the pdf.

Apparently Google scanned this from a book that was or used to be in a University of California library.  Thanks for punching your ownership mark on to most of these pages.  Also a tip of the hat to the editor who added the speech balloon to illustration 28.