cover image A House of Cards: Baseball Card Collecting and Popular Culture

A House of Cards: Baseball Card Collecting and Popular Culture

John Bloom. University of Minnesota Press, $56.95 (160pp) ISBN 978-0-8166-2870-4

Bloom uses ""repatriated ethnography""-loosely: turning ethnographic methods toward one's own culture-to study adult baseball card collectors and dealers. Like many American Studies devotees, Bloom plays amateur statistician, journalist, sociologist, psychologist and anthropologist to learn why some of his fellow white, male middle-class Americans can't put their boyhood hobby away. He self-consciously reveals that he's from the ""narrowly conceived, affluent suburbs of San Francisco,"" which differentiates him from his 31 subjects (all but three are white men), who are from more humble origins. In true American Studies fashion we know what each subject's parents did for a living, but not whether any of them has a Ted Williams rookie card. Fans of this particular discipline will not be surprised at Bloom's conclusions: men collect cards because they are oppressed in the work force; wish they could return to a boys' club brand of intimacy with other men, before the competition of dating sets in; and are trying to define themselves in a time of social and economic change. Fans of baseball and baseball cards will drool over Bloom's quotes from the Topps Company's annual reports-in which the manufacturer first concludes that the card market isn't just for gum-chewers any more-and will eat up the personal essay-style details of the shows and collectors' habits. But these Trillin-esque treats are too few and are pushed aside in favor of anecdotal ""evidence"" to support Bloom's cultural theories. (Mar.)