| Details | | Publication Date: | 1997-03-01 | | Series: | American Culture (Minneapolis, Minn.), 12. |
| Size | | Length: | 142 pages | | Height: | 9.0 in | | Width: | 5.5 in | | Thickness: | 0.2 in | | Weight: | 8.0 oz |
Publisher's Note
Explores the connection between baseball card collecting and nostalgia among men of the baby boom. "Collectors often decried how money had ruined their hobby, making it hard for them to form meaningful friendships through their cards. Money, however, made the hobby not only profitable but also more serious, more instrumental, and therefore more manly. The same collectors who complained about greed often bragged in the same interview about the value of their cards. Yet money, in turn, made the hobby less akin to child's play and more like work: lonely, competitive, unfulfilling, and alienating". Baseball card collecting carries with it images of idealized boyhoods in the sprawling American suburbs of the postwar era. Yet in the past twenty years, it has grown from a pastime for children to a big-money pursuit taken seriously by adults. In A House of Cards, John Bloom uses interviews with collectors, dealers, and hobbyists as well as analysis of the baseball card industry and extensive firsthand observations to ask what this hobby tells us about nostalgia, work, play, masculinity, and race and gender relations among collectors. Beginning in the late 1970s and into the early 1990s, baseball card collecting grew into a business that embodied traditional masculine values such as competition, savvy, and industry. In A House of Cards, Bloom interviews collectors who reveal ambivalence about the hobby's emphasis on these values, often focusing on its alienating, lonely, and unfulfilling aspects. They express nostalgia for the ideal childhood world many middle-class white males experienced in the postwar years, when they perceived baseball card collecting as a form of play, not amoneymaking enterprise. Bloom links this nostalgia to anxieties about deindustrialization and the rise of the civil rights, feminist, and gay rights movements. He examines the gendered nature of swap meets as well as the views of masculinity expressed by the collectors: Is the purpose of baseball card collecting to form a community of adults to reminisce or to inculcate young men with traditional masculine values? Is it to establish "connectedness" or to make money? Are collectors striving to reinforce the dominant culture or question it through their attempts to create their own meaning out of what are, in fact, mass-produced commercial artifacts? Bloom provides a fascinating exploration of male fan culture, ultimately providing insight into the ways white men of the baby boom view themselves, masculinity, and the culture at large.
Industry Reviews
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.)
Lopate
| See an error? Submit a change request |
All rights reserved.
