A house of cards Book

Wrote a more thorough review on my blog


A rich and interesting study that links collecting, popular culture, structural analysis, sports studies, and historical memory.

This book is the result of Bloom's PhD research, in which he attempts to locate Baseball card collecting as a site of meaningful, if contradictory social processes. As he notes in the opening chapter, he is interested how " the popularization of baseball nostalgia throughout the past one hundred years illustrates not only conflicting ways of appreciating sports but also the conflicting positions men often feel themselves assuming within modern structures." In other words, he explores baseball card collecting as a mechanism through which men grapple with what it meant to be men once, and what it might mean to be a man today.This is a unique approach to the study of collecting, which often side-steps the structural nodes of meaning that hover over collections in favor of a focus on economic value, or on the idiosyncratic (and individualistic) meanings that collectors place upon their own collections. Indeed, Bloom writes cogently about the ways in which value itself was a site of tension within baseball card collectors as a group, and how the increasing commoditization of a youthful and emotaionally affective hobby brought about contradictions in the ways in which collectors understood themselves and their collections.