Old Judge Book

[Rad_Hazard]

I'm sure most of you have heard of and/or own a copy, but I recently picked one up myself and it's absolutely incredible. Beautiful full color pics of all known cards as well as player bios, OJ history, advertising, etc etc. Easily my favorite book regarding baseball cards.

[Baseball Rarities]

Such a great book. It is a must have for any hobby library, no matter what you collect.

[Jay Wolt]

I've had a copy for years, great book, no collector should be w/out it.
The authors are N54 members as well

[Fred]

It's arguably one of the best (if not the best) card reference guides dedicated to a specific card set.

A few of us keep waiting for an update (not in the way of an issued book) that covers new findings. I wouldn't have to be a Word, PDF format document- really, a few of us would take anything including copies of bar napkin notes or even post-its. Perhaps some day Jay, Joe and or Richard will give us dogs a bone and provide something. For now, any update is like the release of Chinese Democracy by Guns n Roses.

To note, as Jay would tell you, write notes in your OJ Bible (that's what I call it) when you hear about things. So let's get you started - note 1 (one of the latest things to be "unearthed") - See the last Heritage auction and locate the Pat Deasely card. Then look in the OJ Bible and you will notice that there is no team designation for "Washington" for that particular pose. What you'll also notice is that the card is BEAUTIFUL, but perhaps not $2.6K beautiful. I'm of the opinion that there are a few hardcore OJ collectors that wanted the card because of the undocumented team variation.

It's definitely a book that every hobbyist should own. If there was a Hall of Fame for sports cards books, this would make it as one of the Fab-5 first inductees and imho, be the Babe Ruth of sports card books.

[ejharrington]

IMO, the best baseball card book ever written.

[67airborne]

When this book arrived in the mail, it messed up the rest of my day.
I opened the package and couldn’t put the book down for hours.

[Rad_Hazard]

Originally Posted by 67airborne

When this book arrived in the mail, it messed up the rest of my day.
I opened the package and couldn’t put the book down for hours.

Haha! Same here. I opened it and then the day was ruined (or perfect, depends on how you look at it). I was up all night digging into different players and looking them up.

[rjackson44]

I own a copy and 4 ojs ,,i wonder what collector owns the most ojs ,,its a terrific read ,,

[oldjudge]

It’s fun to see new people discovering the book fifteen years after we released it (doesn’t seem that long but the calendar doesn’t lie). One update I can easily provide relates to the number of subjects in the set. When we wrote the book there were 521 known to us. Since then two more have been discovered. The first was Tug Wilson (Joe and I did an article in Old Cardbiard about this). To summarize, it turned out that half the poses of Joe Miller, himself a scarce card, were in fact Tug Wilson.I realized this one day by, of all things, looking at the book. In there we had an image of a glass plate negative of Tug Wilson. The more I looked at the image the more I could swear I had seen it before so I paged through all the poses and it turned out to be a pose with Joe Miller’s name on it. Then I took a look at all the Miller cards and half were Joe Miller and the other half were Tug Wilson. Because on 19th century cards the image governs whose card it is we had a new player. The second addition was Roscoe Coughlin. This one was easy, a card of his was discovered. In the book, based on lists inserted in packs to order N173s, we speculated as to what players might still be discovered. Coughlin was one of those so it was not a complete shock that a card of his was found. There may be others from that list out there—keep looking.

[Rad_Hazard]

Originally Posted by rjackson44

I own a copy and 4 ojs ,,i wonder what collector owns the most ojs ,,its a terrific read ,,

I'm at 8 so far, and each one is a treasure.

Originally Posted by oldjudge

It’s fun to see new people discovering the book fifteen years after we released it (doesn’t seem that long but the calendar doesn’t lie). One update I can easily provide relates to the number of subjects in the set. When we wrote the book there were 521 known to us. Since then two more have been discovered. The first was Tug Wilson (Joe and I did an article in Old Cardbiard about this). To summarize, it turned out that half the poses of Joe Miller, himself a scarce card, were in fact Tug Wilson.I realized this one day by, of all things, looking at the book. In there we had an image of a glass plate negative of Tug Wilson. The more I looked at the image the more I could swear I had seen it before so I paged through all the poses and it turned out to be a pose with Joe Miller’s name on it. Then I took a look at all the Miller cards and half were Joe Miller and the other half were Tug Wilson. Because on 19th century cards the image governs whose card it is we had a new player. The second addition was Roscoe Coughlin. This one was easy, a card of his was discovered. In the book, based on lists inserted in packs to order N173s, we speculated as to what players might still be discovered. Coughlin was one of those so it was not a complete shock that a card of his was found. There may be others from that list out there—keep looking.

Amazing! I'm absolutely blown away by this book, the ultimate in information and eye candy.

[brianp-beme]

Ezra Sutton also thinks it is the best vintage baseball card book ever published, and not just because he is one of the 523 or so subjects.

Brian (I also think the same as Ezra. I'm no better than Ezra)

[Exhibitman]

I wonder if baseball's Tug Wilson took his nickname from the boxer Tug Wilson, who was a heavyweight contender at the time and is in the N174 set? "Promised $1,000 if he could survive four rounds with Sullivan on July 17, 1882 at Madison Square Garden, Wilson resorted to running, wrestling and intentionally falling down to elude the champion, earning the prize but the scorn of his competitor and the crowd on hand to witness the debacle." --Heritage Auctions. I gather the ballplayer had just about as illustrious a career.