House Of Cards: Baseball Card Collecting and Popular Culture (American Culture) by John Bloom

A study of baseball-card collecting in the upper Midwest becomes ``an ethnographic account of a local fan culture'' by dint of Bloom's wearisome academese. Bloom (American Studies/Dickinson Coll.) latches onto the perhaps obvious premise that ``white middle class men were the primary constituency that comprised the core of the baseball card collecting hobby'' and never lets go. His study covers the late 1980s into the 1990s, after the hobby had been thoroughly commercialized by home-shopping shows on cable television. A hobby with its origins in ``the nostalgia for innocence located in symbols of white middle-class boyhood'' became a big business back in the mid-1970s, when the number of serious collectors grew from 4,000 to 250,000. The Fleer Corporation's successful antitrust suit against Topps opened the door for other companies to produce cards. That, Bloom argues, set off the direct-marketing boom of the late 1980s; baseball cards became the product rather than the incentive to buy a product, such as cereal or gum or cupcakes. Bloom goes on to examine the dynamics of sports memorabilia shows, finding a class structure among the dealers and collectors in their baseball caps and beer-commercial T-shirts. Those he studied ``attempted to make a mass-media form meaningful within their collecting subculture.'' Numbing statements unfortunately blot out astute, ironic observations, such as Bloom's noting the annoyance show dealers have with children: What was once a boy's hobby now has little patience for childish enthusiasms. Not a collector himself, Bloom refers to his interviewees by first names only (``I first learned of Dave when I was interviewing Bob . . .''), thus giving their statements a confessional edge, like testimony at an AA meeting. Bloom's occasional cogent observations would be better served by levity and clarity. -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Reader Reviews
Collecting baseball cards evokes memories of crisp wax paper; the assault of a preadolescent nose with the aroma of sickly sweet, often stale, powder-sugar coated bubble gum; the thrill of your first Ted Williams card; and of clothes-pinning your sixth Pedro Ramos in your bicycle spokes. In stark contrast, Bloom's book portrays collectors in the angry, white man role; discusses the collector's insecurities about their rapidly declining social position; their disturbing attitudes toward blacks and women; and their apparent inability to get a date in high school. Why is Bloom saying such disparaging things about the people who collect baseball cards? Bloom spent some time in the late 1980s attending baseball card shows in Minnesota. His observations at the shows, sports card shops, interviews with hobbyists, and secondary research, form the basis for this adaptation of his doctoral thesis. Baseball card collecting can evolve from a children's hobby to an adult's business. But the hobby took on an entirely new dynamic during the Reagan years. Many American boys collected cards, and in the economic boom of the 1980s, price's escalated, and collectors found (if mom hadn't gotten there first) treasure troves in long-forgotten, old shoe boxes. Unfortunately, many believed, including Bloom, that the newfound wealth corrupted the hobby. Bloom's typical adult collector is white, male, and lower-middle class. In turn, Bloom blames these card collectors for failed marriages, deceit, deception, the manipulation of children, the exclusion and derision of women, and distancing the races. But is the assertion valid that adult collectors are sexist, merely because the majority are male? Similarly, are they racist because a majority are white? Is the fact that Mickey Mantle's 1952 Topps rookie card sells at a higher price than Willie Mays' 1952 card, justifiable evidence of racism among the collecting enthusiasts as the author brazenly maintains? The impact and social ramifications of collecting baseball cards appear to be stretched beyond the realm of plausibility to make an alarming, though questionable, point. Is it possible that collecting bits of cardboard, emblazoned with the images of childhood heroes, really be the cause of this much social discord? But the author has missed a critical point. Bloom states that the cards, in and of themselves, "are of no real consequence." Most collectors would vehemently disagree. Baseball cards derive their value by resurrecting the reminiscences of the collector's youthful heroes. There is a collective social memory which envelops the collectors and their cards. The fact that trade guides indicate that selected cards may have some extrinsic value is nice, but for the majority of collectors, not paramount. The same native affinity does not permeate collecting spoons, stamps or coins, or even football or basketball cards. The fact that these collectibles are baseball cards matters a great deal.

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