Thirty Years and Thirty K, but

[Keith H. Thompson]

There are Net54 readers out there who know far more than I about the Harry Wright scorebooks, but let's consider. Barry Sloate recalls that there were exactly ten scorebooks in the Foster collection as purchased in 1990.

Boston 1878, 1879, 1889, 1881
Providence 1883
Philadelphia 1884, 1885, 1886, 1888, 1889-90

1982 Providence and 1887 Philadelphia were conspicuously missing.
Purpose of this message is to imply that most of the yearbooks are probably still intact in the collections of old timers in their original bound form. I infer this because I never have seen a great many individual program pages for sale either at auction or on a dealer's table. And when I have, it is usually one that has a full signature in the scorer's box and thus more valuable.

My question is: what is the provenance of Foster's collection? I went to the NYPL a few years ago and asked to see the "ten Harry Wight scorebooks" as listed in their catalogue file. I was immediately escorted to an office where I had to explain "why was I interested." I was then shown a simple file containing exactly ten scorecards, not scorebooks, of roughly the same time frame, but none were scored or had anything about them identifying them with Harry Wright.