Cardboard Books bulletin: Boyd and Harris found!
June 25, 2009My own cardboard supplications will resume soon, I promise, but in the meantime I just wanted to take a second to pass along an article that was just kindly passed along to me. From time to time, I try to write about books on this site (under the “Cardboard Books” heading); I haven’t gotten around to appreciating the book mentioned in the article because I hardly know where to start in my appreciation. The authors wrote one of the best sports books ever and invented and perfected the genre I have spent the past few years happily exploring. Brendan Boyd and Fred C. Harris rule. Often I’ve wondered whatever became of these co-authors of The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book, and this LA Times article by David Davis has the answer to that question.
Cardboard Gods 
One of my favorite BOOKS, period, of all time.
I think I was around twelve years old when I first acquired it,
in hardcover, though I don’t remember the details.
However, it’s the type of thing where you can pull it out every few years or so, and enjoy reading parts of it, at random, all over again.
Countless hours of enjoyment from this book, I tell you.
It’s influence on my personal frame of reference is probably right up there with MAD magazine, freeform radio, The Beatles, SCTV, old National Lampoons, punk rock, and the movie ‘Taxi Driver.’
I have to get this book.
Their book was in fact the very reason I found your blog.
I was thinking that writing about players based on their BB cards like they did would be a great concept for a blog, then I got searchin. That search led me to Cardboard Gods.
The Boyd/Harris book was HUGE for me and my friends as kids, and the copy I found at a garage sale a few years ago is one of my most prized possessions.
This is a great book. The only complaint is the odd size. But for anyone who has not read it – it really is worth searching out. It certainly helps if you know the players from the 1950s and 1960s but it is by no means necessary.
About ten years ago I first read excerpts on Sox trading cards from Boyd and Harris in Dan Riley’s Red Sox Reader, thinking that they wrote exclusively on Red Sox players. Then I found an old library book edition sold second hand. I had never considered writing about the most important memories I had as a fan in that way. It’s an original, but your blog has been a great extension on the tradition, Josh.