Sporting Life Publications Collection
 

I have been wanting to put a website together to house photos and information about this collection of Sporting Life publications. It consists of 650 issues from 1899-1911 that are bound in 22 volumes. Here is the link to the website:

https://sites.google.com/view/sporti.../sporting-life

It has been a fun project and really helped me learn about the history of baseball.

Hi Kevin, that's an incredible collection of Sporting Life publications...650 issues in 22 bound volumes - wow. Do any bound volumes of SL publications after 1911 exist?

Very cool site Kevin

Sporting Life issues were not produced in a bound format. Instead the binding of issues was done by an organization such as a library in order to organize the issues and allow people access to previous ones.

I have seen bound volumes from later dates as well. Some of the issues of Sporting Life that are in the market have been cut from these bindings. For example, I know the Baseball Hall of Fame had some bound volumes that they cut in order to digitize the information and then the individual issues were sold. I have considered cutting these out as well. With that being said, one of the main reasons these issues have survived for 125 years in such great condition is due to the fact that they were bound.

I’ve always loved Sporting Life magazines. They are very fragile and take up room to store in a climate control room. But talk about great history which includes articles and pictures.

The the Ruth version with the wrong name from 1916.

Incredible collection.

Those are amazing JC! Very nice.

Kevin, thanks for putting this together. That's an incredible collection. Thanks for sharing!

Jay, thanks for adding your pictures. These are great! They have such amazing visual appeal! The fragility of Sporting Life's has really varied for me. The ones from the Baseball Hall of Fame collection that we sold were extremely fragile. I have a few of those and the edges chipped very easy. However other issues that I have can be handled just fine without any concerns. I'm guessing like any paper items, how they were stored over the last 100+ years has a significant impact on their fragility.

Quite the labor of love. Fantastic!

As I keep digging through these issues, I continue to discover things I’ve previously missed. Being from Minnesota, I thought finding this image from the Minneapolis team pretty cool. Also, I love the heading on this issue; “Electric Light Ball.”