John Thorn, Our Game:
In baseball literature, this little book – sixty-four pages, dimensions two inches by two-and-a-half inches, printed on "blood parchment" and "bound in the skin of a baseball" – is the rarest of the rare. The New York Public Library has a copy, and so does the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library. Three other copies appear to exist, also held by institutions, and another, the sixth, was sold at auction nine years ago. Its author is Thomas William Lawson, who would go on to fame as a wizard of Wall Street, but who at this time was the manager of a troubled publishing firm in Boston, Rand Avery Company, which printed the book and sold it to the public for twenty-five cents.