1950s Baseball (Mostly) Scrapbook With 1953 Bowman Mantle

Bidding

This lot is closed for bidding. Bidding ended on 8/6/2020

This is absolutely one of the coolest vintage scrapbooks we’ve ever handled, and not just because there’s a reasonably attractive 1953 Bowman Mickey Mantle affixed to the inside back cover. That card is one of 10 Bowman cards from 1953 that have been unceremoniously glued to the back cover; a half dozen 1947-66 Exhibit Supply Co. cards suffered a similar fate on the inside front cover. These are, one supposes, the headliners in a spectacular 12-by-19-inch photo album that has been converted into a classic scrapbook featuring mostly baseball from the period but also pays tribute to a few basketball players, boxers and track-and-field stalwarts. There are 28 pages of the heavy black pages that customarily were used in photo albums. Almost every page is filled with either black-and-white or full-color portraits of great stars of the day, often with a Pittsburgh-area emphasis. The heavy board front and back covers are broadly Very Good, with some slight surface loss on the front upper-right corner. The roster of 1953 Bowmans glued to the back includes Mantle (as noted), Sal Maglie, Roy McMillan, Mike Garcia, Walt Dropo, Ned Garver and Art Houtteman, among others, with those last two having separated from the back cover and revealing considerable back damage from the process. The six Exhibit cards on the inside front are Otto Graham, Sammy Baugh, Kid Gavilan, Archie Moore, Ralph Kiner and Stan Musial. There are approximately 56 color photos carefully pasted inside, most seemingly from newspapers and magazines and at least a dozen or more approaching the full size of the page itself. That roster includes the likes of Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Musial, Duke Snider (3), Mays, Ted Williams, Berra, Campanella, Stengel, Kluszewski (2), Frank Robinson, Spahn (2), Eddie Mathews, Robin Roberts (2), Feller, Bragan, Virdon, Dale Long, and others, plus eight track stars and NBA legends Bill Russell, Wilt Chamberlain and Bob Pettitt. There are another two dozen or so black-and-white photos of many of the same stars listed above, plus Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker, Jackie Robinson and many others. The final element is the boxing contingent, which includes a massive color image of Carmen Basilio, plus others of Floyd Patterson, Archie Moore, Sugar Ray Robinson and others. All told it’s a simply remarkable stroll down memory lane in the mid-1950s of the American sports scene and a considerable value even without undertaking unsentimental musings about getting that 1953 Bowman professionally un-affixed to that back cover.