What Inspires Me? Digging Through the LOC Stacks
This is a page from the 1893 H.H. Kiffe Catalogue. How did I find it? Joanna Colclough, a Librarian Extraordinaire/Archival Archeologist at the Library of Congress dug it up!
That’s what inspires me: The Library of Congress!
The Library of Congress (LOC) is “the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the de facto national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country.” -wikipedia
What’s in the Library of Congress?
Copies of every publication in the English language that is deemed significant. Specifically:
via Wikipedia: “The Library of Congress states that its collection fills about 838 miles (1,349 km) of bookshelves and holds more than 167 million items with over 39 million books and other print materials.[5] A 2000 study by information scientists Peter Lyman and Hal Varian suggested that the amount of uncompressed textual data represented by the 26 million books then in the collection was 10 terabytes.[77
What’s especially inspiring is that the Library of Congress is OUR LIBRARY!
Each of us—me and you—can access the library. We can visit it in person—it is an actual library located in Washington D.C. and we are welcome to visit it, browse the collections, see the books and some memorabilia and collection items ourselves.
But, what’s easier is that much of the Library of Congress holdings—especially photographs—is on line! All we have to do is input what you’re looking for in the search box, click and look!
And if, like me, you need lots of extra help finding what you’re looking for, the Library of Congress staff is super helpful.
See for yourself! Click to Visit the Library of Congress!
See you at our library!
I’ve been digging—yep! Elbow deep, digging, but not “in the dirt.” I’ve been digging through the Library of Congress archives in search of baseball minutiae for my forthcoming picture book The House That Ruth Built (Familius 2023). It’s about the opening day game in the original Yankee Stadium and Babe Ruth’s historic first homer in the stadium, but so much more. It’s about the origin of the game, and history—so much history—100 plus plus plus year-old history of the sport and the world as it was back then. For instance, how do you think that April 18th, 1923 game was broadcast?
It wasn’t.
That’s right. No one saw that historic game on TV because there was no TV back then.
No one sat with their ears glued to some huge box radio either, because while radio had been invented—credited to Guglielmo Marconithe in 1894, and the first professional baseball game had been broadcast on the Radio—Aug 5, 1921, Pirates vs Phillies at Forbes Field in Pittsburg— the NY Yankees did not allow their games to be broadcast until the 1923 World Series.
The only people to enjoy that first baseball game played in Yankee Stadium in real time were folks at the actual game. The rest of the world experienced second-hand from sports reporters who shared the play-by-play with fans via telegraph which was then transcribed and printed in newspapers. And where, 100 years and more later, does one find those newspapers?
Kids: Try some Baseball Math!
These pages from the 1893 H.H. Kiffe Catalogue list baseball stuff for sale. If $1 in 1893 is equal in purchasing power to about $32.92 in 2022, how much would one of these baseball hats cost today?
