Old Judge Book

[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.