I have just returned from SABR’s annual Nineteenth Century Baseball Conference in Cooperstown. There a handful of old hands swap stories, in some measure for the benefit of relative newcomers who will extend our studies further. Besides an unparalleled parade of erudition, the meetings are characterized by presentations and panels and convivial times at various groaning boards and pubs. David Block is an old friend whom I am always eager to see again. His interests and exploits in the prehistory of the game are unmatched, most notably in the 2004 book Baseball before We Knew It (Nebraksa, 2005); see: http://goo.gl/ECciIw. Recent inquiries to my social media feeds about what might be the earliest mentions of baseball in print recalled to mind this outstanding essay he wrote for the journal Base Ball in 2008. It is reprinted with the gracious permission of the publisher, McFarland & Company.
A game called baseball arose from the primeval playing fields of southern England during the earliest decades of the ¡8th century. This we can deduce from a smattering of clues that have trickled down from the 1740s and 1750s. While these tidbits generally reveal little about the pastime’s makeup during that era, one specimen rises vividly above the rest: the “base-ball” page from John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-book.
Little Pretty Pocket-book, 1787
Many readers of this journal will be familiar with A Little Pretty Pocket-book’s contribution to our slender understanding of early baseball. The iconic children’s book, first published in 1744, has long been recognized as providing an important benchmark for tracking the game’s evolution. Its employment of the term “base-ball” is the earliest known, and its primitive woodcut and accompanying snippet of verse offer our first fragmentary insights into how the game was played.
The Ball once struck off,
Away flies the Boy
To the next destin’d Post,
And then Home with Joy.
These few simple lines capture baseball’s essence. Their mentions of a boy striking a ball, flying to the “next destin’d post,” and then returning to “home” suggest that by the 1740s the incipient game was already recognizable. Augmented by the woodcut—in which a striker, a pitcher, and three posts or bases are pictured—it is no wonder that Newbery’s baseball page is treasured by those of us with an abiding interest in the pastime’s early history. Yet despite our long familiarity with it (the historian Robert W. Henderson first alerted us to the book’s importance in his 1937 essay, “How Baseball Began”), in many ways it remains an enigma. The goal of this article is to take a closer look at A Little Pretty Pocket-book and, the author hopes, persuade it to give up a few more of its secrets.
* * *
To the kiddies of mid–18th-century England, A Little Pretty Pocket-book must have seemed like a sneak preview of paradise. Never before had any of them encountered a book that illuminated such a cornucopia of pastimes and amusements for their enjoyment. Everything was there: from kite-flying to hopscotch, from leapfrog to “blindman’s buff,” as the book has it. John Newbery’s startling invitation to play games and have fun was an almost total turnabout from the snarling admonitions against frivolous behavior that had snapped at the heels of young folk for centuries. And while A Little Pretty Pocket-book did not forsake all responsibility for tutoring children to be upright and virtuous (after all, it included letters from Jack the Giant-Killer to Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly promising them a whipping if they misbehaved), the book clearly relegated traditional moral instruction to a secondary role.
Little Pretty Pocket-book, 1760.
Among the pastimes offered for the delight of A Little Pretty Pocket-book’s young readers were five constituents of the extended baseball family. In addition to baseball itself, these included the games of cricket, stool-ball, trap-ball, and tip-cat. The latter four were widely played amusements of the era, and it is no surprise that Newbery would elect to feature them in his book. Far less obvious is why he included the relatively new game of baseball, given the likelihood that many of his potential readers in the mid–18th century would not have been familiar with it. His selection of it suggests that he may well have gained an intimate acquaintance with the pastime during his own childhood, raising the tantalizing premise that baseball’s first steps could have been taken on terrain very close to Newbery’s own upbringing.
That would be in Berkshire County, England, where in 1713 Newbery was born on a farm near the small village of Waltham St Lawrence. Having had no formal education, but motivated by curiosity and ambition, he left home at the age of 16 to become apprenticed to a printer in the nearby city of Reading, about fifty miles west of London. When his master died a few years later, Newbery took over the business and married the widow—not an unusual arrangement for the times. By the early 1740s he was publishing a newspaper in Reading and beginning to produce occasional book titles for an adult readership. It was also during those years that he began experimenting with other commercial ventures, including the one that was to become his most profitable lifelong source of wealth, the sale of patent medicines. In 1746 he signed a contract to be the exclusive marketer of Dr. James’ Fever Powder, a concoction that was to become widely popular in Britain. Meanwhile, Newbery came to realize that his expanding enterprises were outgrowing the limited market opportunities available in Reading, and in the late summer of 1743 he began to shift his base of operations to London.
It was also in the 1740s that the constrained and stuffy world of children’s-book publishing was beginning to undergo a major change. The influences of the Age of Reason and, in particular, the progressive educational ideas of the philosopher John Locke began seeping into juvenile literature, and a trickle of new titles appeared with the revolutionary premise that books might entertain as well as educate. Moral instruction itself, though still an essential component of the genre, no longer threatened children with the throes of hellfire as the penalty for their naughtiness.
Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book
Newbery was always on the lookout for another good business opportunity, and he quickly recognized the potential of this new type of juvenile literature. A Little Pretty Pocket-book was his first entrant in the field, and its great success led him to produce many more children’s titles before his death in 1767. The Pocket-book has been hailed as “the first true children’s book” or, more commonly, “the first book intended primarily for children’s enjoyment.” Evidently it was neither. Preceding it in the early 1740s were Thomas Boreman’s series of “Gigantick Histories,” and Mary Cooper’s two titles, The Child’s New Plaything and Tommy Thumb’s Pretty Song-Book. The essayist Mary Thwaite, in her introduction to the 1966 facsimile edition of A Little Pretty Pocket-book, conceded that the Tommy Thumb book “rivalled the Pocket-book in importance in the chronicle of children’s literature.”[1]
But if Newbery wasn’t the very first to see the wisdom in producing books for children’s entertainment, he was certainly the first to go for the fences with the idea. One key to his success was his marketing skill, and particularly his adroitness at “puffing” his works. He carried over to his juvenile publishing venture the same creative persuasion he employed in hawking his assortment of patent medicines. His earliest display of this talent is expressed in the following advertisement that, according to all Newbery sources, first appeared in the June 18, 1744, issue of the Penny London Morning Advertiser:
This Day is publish’d,
According to Act of Parliament
(Neatly bound and gilt.)
A Little pretty POCKET BOOK
intended for the Instruction and Amusement of little Master Tommy and pretty Miss Polly; with an agreeable Letter to each from Jack the Giant-Killer; as also a Ball and Pincushion, the Use of which will infallibly make Tommy a good Boy, and Polly a good Girl. To the whole is prefix’d, A Lecture on Education, humbly address’d to all Parents, Guardians, Governesses, &cc., wherein Rules are laid down for making their Children strong, hardy, healthy, virtuous, wise and happy.
Children, like tender OZIERS, take the Bow,
And as they first are fashioned, always grow.
Just as the Twig is bent the Tree’s inclin’d.
’Tis Education forms the vulgar Mind.
Printed for J. Newbery, at the Bible and Crown, near Devereux-Court, without Temple-Bar.
Price of the Book alone 6 d. with a Ball or Pincushion 8 d.
There are many things to be observed about this ad, not the least being its deftness at appealing to both of its target audiences: the parents who might consider purchasing A Little Pretty Pocket-book for their children, and the little kiddies themselves. Notable among Newbery’s inducements to the latter is his optional offer to bundle a ball or pincushion with the book. This revolutionary notion of attaching a toy anticipates by 250 years the Klutz Book series of today.
May 19, 1744 ad in Daily Gazetteer
Scholars who have written about Newbery’s works have assumed that the ball and pincushion were two separate items, the former intended for boys and the latter for girls. A careful reading of the book, however, reveals the objects were one and the same: a soft, red-and-black-colored ball that allowed for the insertion of pins. The “letters” from Jack the Giant-Killer published in A Little Pretty Pocket-book, and addressed to Tommy and Polly respectively, prescribed a common purpose for the ball/pincushion whether its recipient was a boy or a girl. The child was directed to hang the toy up by a string that came attached to it. Then, using 10 pins that were also supplied, the child was instructed to stick a pin in the red half of the ball/pincushion whenever he/she did something good, and a pin in the black half for every bad act. If the child managed to accumulate all 10 pins in the red side, Jack the Giant-Killer pledged (ostensibly) to send the child a penny. Conversely, 10 pins in the black side would result in Jack sending a rod with which the child was to be “whipt.” The publishers of the modern Klutz Books evidently had the good sense not to adopt this darker aspect of Newbery’s innovation.
No one knows how many individual ball/pincushion premiums were sold in tandem with copies of A Little Pretty Pocket-book over the course of the book’s long publishing history in the 18th century. One thing that is certain, though, is that few or none of the toys have survived. The only institution to claim ownership of an original specimen is the Morgan Library in New York. Its example of the ball/pincushion, however, is white on one side with an embroidered design on the other, not at all like the red and black object described in all known editions of the Pocket-book. Moreover, the library’s records cannot document the provenance of its copy, having no information earlier than 1991 when the toy was received as a gift.
To book and baseball historians alike, the most significant contribution of Newbery’s June 1744 advertisement for A Little Pretty Pocket-book may well be its opening phrase: “This day is publish’d….” Here, it would seem, is proof of the exact moment in history when this landmark children’s book first rolled o› the presses. Such evidence is vital in establishing the book’s origins, for no actual copies of A Little Pretty Pocket-book from 1744 have survived. In fact, no actual copies of any of the book’s first nine editions are known to exist, which makes, by default, the British Library’s single incomplete copy of the 1760 10th edition the earliest surviving example. And of all the thousands of copies of the book printed in England in the 18th century, fewer than 10 remain.[2] Why this near extinction? In all likelihood, it is the unfortunate byproduct of two parallel phenomena. On the one hand, the little darlings who were lucky enough to get their hands on the book probably loved their copies to death. And if an original owner didn’t leave the book in tatters, his or her next youngest sibling or cousin would have finished the job. Parents, all the while, would have had little interest in the book, at best valuing it as a diversion for their kids, but not as something they would bother preserving for posterity (not unlike those ill-fated shoeboxes of baseball cards of more recent memory).
Little Pretty Pocket-book, 1760.
But while the books themselves are gone, we still have Newbery’s helpful advertisement from 1744 to mark the starting point of baseball’s recorded history. Right? Well, not so fast. It seems that even this seemingly safe assumption turns out not to be airtight. Writing in 1973, Newbery’s foremost bibliographer, Sydney Roscoe, offered a cautionary word about relying upon newspaper ads to fix a book’s publication date:
… the unsupported evidence of a newspaper advertisement cannot, as a rule, be relied on for dating purposes…. It may well be that A Little Pretty Pocket-book did bear the date 1744 and did appear in (or near to) June of that year; but the evidence of the advertisements is not sufficient to prove it; it might have been published a year or two before, or even in 1745 or later.[3]
Reading these lines prompted me to see if there was anything further to be discovered about Pocket-book’s publication date. On a recent trip to England I consulted with the longtime archivist of the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers, a 600-year-old organization that has been registering the publication of individual books for most of its existence. Disappointingly, no entry for A Little Pretty Pocket-book appears in the company’s records, most likely because children’s books in the 1740s were deemed too unimportant for such formality. Thwarted here, my next step was to examine newspapers from the era, especially issues of The Reading Mercury; or Weekly Post, the paper that Newbery owned and operated during those years. I found several ads for Pocket-book in the Mercury, with the earliest appearing on May 28, 1774. This ad, like the one that would appear three weeks later in the Penny London Morning Advertiser, began with the phrase “this Day is publish’d,” confirming that the use of those four words was not a literal announcement of the book’s publishing date.
Moving my search to the many London daily newspapers of the era, I came across a quantity of additional advertisements for A Little Pretty Pocket-book, most with the same “this day is publish’d” lead-in. These were scattered over a period of months and years, with the earliest ones clustered in mid–May 1744. The first three of these appeared on May 18 of that year, and four more showed up the following day. I found none earlier than May 18, despite spending a couple of days with microfilm archives and electronic newspaper databases. Clearly, this concentration of advertisements in mid–May 1744 does not in itself reliably pinpoint when A Little Pretty Pocket-book first rolled off the presses, nor even when it first was sold. It does imply strongly, however, that those two days in May marked the beginning of Newbery’s marketing push for the book, and suggests that his production of it very possibly occurred in the immediate weeks beforehand.
My combing of the newspapers also produced several interesting testimonials to the wonderments of A Little Pretty Pocket-book. One of them was dated June 14, 1744, and addressed “to the unknown author of the Little Pretty Pocket-book.” It rambled on and on with flowery praises such as: “here the paths of virtue are painted so as to please and engage, the child is captivated and led into a habit of doing well and made imperceptibly, as it were, both wise and virtuous.” Two more such letters were published on July 16 in Newbery’s own paper, the Mercury. One accurately describes how the book presents “brief descriptions in verse … of the several plays or games with which children usually divert themselves, each game being represented by a small copper plate print, with a suitable moral or rule of life subjoined.” This same writer observed that although “the author has modestly concealed himself … his performance … will undoubtedly meet with the approbation of all who would rather make learning a pleasure to those under their care, than weary themselves and their children with fruitless severities and correction.” While those who wrote testimonials were on the mark with their recognition of Newbery’s educational innovations, none of them, unfortunately, was prescient enough to praise the Pocket-book for its foresighted presentation of baseball.
Cricket, Little Pretty 1760
At least one modern scholar has raised the cynical hypothesis that Newbery himself may have written the newspaper testimonials praising his book, doing so as part of his campaign to puff it to the public. But a more fundamental question is whether Newbery actually wrote A Little Pretty Pocket-book itself. As noted by the two testimonial writers quoted above, the book was issued anonymously. While no hard evidence of the author’s identity has ever been produced, a clear consensus among those who have written about Newbery maintain that he is, by far, the most likely candidate. The style of the book parallels the whimsical approach he displayed in most of the works he is known to have written, especially in the many humorous title pages that introduce all of his many children’s books.
If the advertisements identified above give us more confidence that A Little Pretty Pocket-book was indeed first published in 1744, then the matter of when baseball first appeared in print should now be resolved. Yes, perhaps. But it seems that one small element of doubt still remains. While we know for certain that the 1760 10th edition of Pocket-book included the famous “base-ball” page, as did all subsequent surviving editions of the book, how can we know that it appeared in each of those earlier nine editions that are now extinct? We can’t rule out the small possibility that Newbery tinkered with the book between 1744 and 1760, and that the baseball content was not part of its original makeup. The caveat here is that when we celebrate the iconic year of 1744 for giving us the earliest reference to baseball, we must do so with a small asterisk.
A couple of other little baseball mysteries attach to A Little Pretty Pocket-book, one being that of the missing bat, and the other of the missing ball. The book’s illustration of baseball depicts three boys standing next to three posts or bases. One of the players is seen raising his hands out to his sides, while a second player appears ready to toss a ball. None of them, quite plainly, is holding a bat. What does this mean? Did the artist simply overlook the necessity of drawing a bat, or was a bat not actually part of the game in 1744? To pursue these questions, I examined every known early reference to the game of baseball from both England and the United States. What I found was somewhat surprising. Of the nine instances in the 18th century where the term “baseball” appeared in either a handwritten manuscript or in a printed book, only once was there mention of a bat being part of the game. That came in a description of “English base-ball” from a German book published in 1796, in which an odd-shaped, two-foot-long bat was depicted.[4]
Base-Ball, 1787 (and 1744 too?)
Turning next to early 19th-century baseball references from both countries, I continued to find little evidence of bat usage. In fact, after 1796 it was not until 1834, when the American author Robin Carver mentioned the use of a bat in describing “base, or goal ball” in The Book of Sports, that the terms “baseball” and “bat” were again definitively linked with each other.[5] This is not to suggest that American baseball was batless prior to 1834. Obviously, that was not the case. Ballplayers from that era, reminiscing about their experiences many years afterwards, recalled using a bat during those early decades. Moreover, young players standing with bat in hand feature prominently in woodcut illustrations of baseball-like games found in children’s books of the early 1800s.
But the question of when a bat was first introduced to the pastime remains a mystery. It is certainly possible, if not probable, that, at its outset, the game of baseball did not employ a bat, and that a bare hand was used to strike the pitched ball. The innovation of utilizing a bat may not have come about until the latter part of the 18th century. Notwithstanding the evidence of the 1796 German book, the variety of baseball that evolved in England may never have fully embraced the bat, since none of the 19th-century references to the game there mention anything about using such an implement. On the other hand, despite the absence of concrete evidence, it is quite likely that use of a bat became an integral part of the game in the United States well before the end of the 18th century. This divergence in how the pastime developed may be explained by its different social underpinnings in the two countries; in England, baseball became a pastime primarily for girls and young women, while in America it became the near-exclusive province of boys and men. The faster, larger-scaled, and, perhaps, rougher version of the sport that accompanied the adoption of the bat may well have edged beyond what was considered acceptable behavior for young English ladies of that era.
Pitcher in 1760 and 1787
Then there is the matter of the missing ball, which is a puzzling result of A Little Pretty Pocket-book’s adventures in North America. With the great popularity of Newbery’s books in Britain, it was only a matter of time before they would begin to show up in the American colonies. As early as 1750, advertisements for his juvenile works were appearing in newspapers on the eastern seaboard.[6] Surprisingly, these first ads did not include A Little Pretty Pocket-book, despite it being among Newbery’s most successful titles. The first known reference to Pocket-book in the future United States did not materialize until 1762, when it appeared in an advertisement by New York bookseller Hugh Gaine.[7] But rather than importing and reselling copies produced by Newbery in England, Gaine apparently decided to cut costs by producing his own pirated edition of the children’s classic. No copies of Gaine’s edition have survived, leaving us unable to determine whether it exactly replicated Newbery’s content. From his advertisement, however, we know that Gaine abbreviated the book’s title to A Little Pretty Book, but otherwise retained all the verbosity about Master Tommy, Miss Polly, and Jack the Giant-Killer in the subtitle. The printer William Spotswood of Philadelphia appears to have introduced another such unauthorized edition of A Little Pretty Pocket-book in 1786, although, like Gaine’s, no copies are known to have survived.
Hugh Gaine’s Little Pretty Book, New-York Mercury, August 30, 1762
Producing pirated copies of English books seems to have been a common practice of publishers in the American colonies and the young United States. Isaiah Thomas’s familiar edition of A Little Pretty Pocket-book also falls into this category. Thomas was a prolific book publisher in Worcester, Massachusetts, and in 1787 produced a version of Newbery’s juvenile gem that remains by far the most “common” of all 18th-century editions of this work, with as many as fifty copies still in existence. Thomas, who later founded the American Antiquarian Society, retained the original ninety or so pages of Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-book, but added to it another 35 pages consisting of “rules for behaviour.” Likely these were a concession to the strict Puritan ethic that carried considerable weight in 18th-century New England, though it is somewhat doubtful that Little Master Tommy and Pretty Miss Polly would have welcomed their inclusion.
Thomas made several slight changes to A Little Pretty Pocket-book’s baseball page, one of which is significant. In Newbery’s original editions, one of the players in the woodcut illustration is shown getting ready to pitch a ball. In Thomas’s Worcester edition that same player’s hand is empty. The ball had disappeared! This is peculiar because, in most other ways, the woodcuts in the two versions of the book are nearly identical. Thomas took care in copying many details of the Newbery image, such as the clothes of the boys and the features of the houses in the background. But he removed the ball. What does it mean? Was it a subliminal attempt to emasculate Newbery? Was it a protest against Newbery’s omission of a bat? Was Thomas too distracted by the sexual-harassment charges pending against him to notice? We may never know the explanation for this oddity, but, then again, does anyone other than I really care?
John Kidgell’s The Card, 1755
From what we know, the pirated versions of Thomas, Gaine, and Spotswood comprised most of the copies of A Little Pretty Pocket-book that were sold in 18th-century America. Few booksellers seem to have imported Newbery’s originals for resale, and there is no evidence of any of them having done so earlier than 1772. Still, it is logical to assume that individual copies of the earlier editions printed in England crossed the ocean in the company of families emigrating to the colonies. Would these have marked the earliest landings on American shores of the term baseball? Not necessarily. In the Fall 2007 issue of this journal, I described a second book published by John Newbery, The Card, in which the term baseball also is referenced. Newbery’s publishing company issued The Card in 1755, and its survival rate greatly exceeds that of A Little Pretty Pocketbook, undoubtedly because as a book for adults it was not subject to the ravages of children. Thirty copies of the first edition of The Card still exist in American libraries, some of which reside in the collections of institutions that predate the American Revolution. It is quite possible that The Card preceded A Little Pretty Pocket-book as the earliest bearer of the word baseball to these shores. Then again, this honor may not have gone to any book at all. The author John Rowe Townsend, in describing the early importation of children’s stories and books to America, commented that “old tales and rhymes, needing no cargo space but people’s heads, crossed the ocean like stowaways with the early settlers in American colonies.”[8] These words could well be applied to the innocent games and pastimes enjoyed by those same travelers.
Earlier I mentioned that it was likely during his youthful days in Waltham St Lawrence and Reading that John Newbery acquired his knowledge of baseball. As an exercise, I thought it might be interesting to link those Berkshire locales with other early geographic indicators of the game to plot the periphery of the English landscape in which the pastime, hypothetically, may have first been played. This territory comprises a crescent that curves a few miles beyond the western and southwestern reaches of the London metropolitan area, and encompasses parts of the counties of Berkshire and Surrey, along with tiny slivers of Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire counties as well.
Northanger Abbey 1818
The northern tip of this crescent begins near Cookham, on the River Thames, where stood Cliveden, the 18th-century country estate of Frederick, Prince of Wales. In a 1748 letter, Lady Hervey famously described Frederick’s family engaged at baseball; although she witnessed this activity at Frederick’s London residence, it was at Cliveden where the family members spent the bulk of their time and where they possibly became familiar with the game.[9] Nine miles southwest of Cookham is the tiny village of Harpsden near the town of Henley-on-Thames, located at the southeastern tip of Oxfordshire. This was the site of the childhood home of Jane Austen’s mother, Cassandra Leigh, through whom Jane likely learned about baseball (she employed the word in her novel Northanger Abbey).[10] It was here that Cassandra Leigh’s younger Oxford cousin, also named Cassandra Leigh, would visit her often. Years later that same cousin, by then writing under her married name of Cassandra Cooke, produced the novel Battleridge in which she too mentioned baseball.[11]
Ten miles south from Henley-on-Thames lies the city of Reading, where, as we have noted, John Newbery worked as a young man, and where too Jane Austen went to school for one and a half years. It was also where the author Mary Russell Mitford lived most of her years. Mitford, whose mother was a childhood friend of Austen, found multiple opportunities to use the term “baseball” in her early 19th-century writings.
Completing our tour of early baseball country, we venture 25 miles southeast of Reading to the county of Surrey, and to the village of Shere. This was the home of William Bray, the lifelong diarist whose reference to baseball in 1755 was the subject of my article in the previous issue of this journal. Joining him in having Surrey connections was John Kidgell, the author of the aforementioned, baseball-bearing 1755 book The Card.
The tight geographic concentration of these early baseball references is intriguing. While far from o›ffering decisive proof that the pastime originated within the boundaries of this fertile crescent, it does suggest a target area for further exploration. I only hope the eager burghers of the region don’t set off prematurely to challenge their counterparts in Cooperstown and Pittsfield.
By all accounts, John Newbery was a super guy. He was loving to his children and generous to his friends, who included such literary luminaries as Samuel Johnson and Oliver Goldsmith. It is also obvious that he looked fondly upon the little masters and misses who were the target audience for his children’s books—an attitude that seems to have been genuine and not simply a device for ensnaring customers. He maintained a running dialogue with his youthful readers through his writings, conveying to them that he was always looking out for their well-being, and revealing a personality that was fatherly and warmly humorous. In Britain, Newbery’s legacy is not widely celebrated, certainly not as much as those of many other literary figures. On my recent visit I asked many Brits what they knew of Newbery, and none but a few librarians were familiar with his name. No archives or libraries there have compiled a special collection of his works, nor have scholars taken a particular interest in him. The lone full biography on Newbery’s life was written in 1885, and only a few short books and a bibliography have been dedicated to him in the years since.
Newbery Medal
By contrast, his name is better known in the United States, principally because it is attached to the Newbery Medal, the award recognizing the most distinguished children’s book of the year. (Ironically, Newbery knew nothing of the United States, having died eight years before its founding.) But whether his contributions to literature are underappreciated in Britain or overblown in the States are matters of little importance to baseball historians. To us he was that farsighted young man who plucked the nascent pastime of baseball from his childhood memories and slid it into his pioneering opus of games and amusements. Without him we would not be able to gaze back in time at those first tentative steps of that toddler that was to become our National Pastime.
Notes
Author’s note: The details of John Newbery’s biography provided in this article are generally known, and have been drawn from a variety of sources, including the Thwaite, Roscoe, and Townsend books cited below.
- Thwaite, M., ed. 1966. A Little Pretty Pocket-book. London (pp. 14–16).
- Documents filed in a 1752 legal dispute give an indication of the size of Newbery’s press runs for A Little Pretty Pocket-book. An itemization of his stock on hand stated that he currently held one thousand copies of the book in his warehouse. Welsh, C. 1885. A Bookseller of the Last Century. New York (pp. 33, 293).
- Roscoe, S. 1973. John Newbery and His Successors 1740–1814, a Bibliography. Wormley, Hertfordshire (p. 392).
- Gutsmuths, J. ¡796. Spiele zur Uebung und Erholung des Körpers und Geistes für die Jugend, ihre Erzieher und alle Freunde Unschuldiger Jugendfreuden. Schnepfenthal (p. 78).
- Carver, R. 1834. The Book of Sports. Boston (pp. 37–38).
- See, e.g., Pennsylvania Gazette: Dec. 11, 1750.
- New York Mercury: Aug. 30, 1762.
- Townsend, J. 1994. John Newbery and His Books. Metuchen, N.J./London (p. 150).
- Lepel, M. 1821. Letters of Mary Lepel, Lady Hervey. London (pp. 139–140).
- Austen, J. 1818. Northanger Abbey: and Persuasion. London.
- Cooke, C. 1799. Battleridge. London.
