The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book

Written in 1973 by Brendan C. Boyd and Fred C. Harris, The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book was an inspired book of often hilarious commentary on the baseball figures of the 1950s and 1960s. The format was to present a baseball card of the player, manager or umpire and to offer a brief commentary of one sentence or, at most, a few hundred words.

Significant snippits lay amid comedic ones, and stars are greatly out-numbered by the mediocre and those already forgotten by the time the book appeared. The book is light, but indispensable, sharing snippets of information about the small incidents and characters that only a kid with a decade's worth of too much time on his hands to thumb through baseball cards and pour over boxscores and AP-wire summaries could know.

Further Reading

• Fred C. Harris and Brendan C. Boyd: The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book, Mariner Books, New York, NY, 1991 (originally published in 1973). ISBN 0395586682
• David Davis: "The bible of baseball cards", The Los Angeles Times, June 28, 2009. [1]