Spalding Baseball Photos Online at The New York Public Library

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Nostalgia for the past is what leads many of us to pour over our old pictures. Recently The New York Public Library posted several thousand old baseball pictures on its website. Known as the NYPL Digital Gallery, the website contains millions of digital images of pictures taken from books and archives found throughout the vast collections of the NYPL.One of the more recent image collections to go live in the NYPL Digital Gallery was the Albert G. Spalding Collection. While not all of the A.G. Spalding Collection is currently available online, we at last have a window through which to see some of the incredible things that Spalding, who must have been a real packrat, collected. The Manuscripts and Archives Division at NYPL posted a description of the A.G. Spalding collection, and although they describe things that are not in the NYPL Digital Gallery, their site has information about Spalding and all of the stuff that he collected during his time as a ball player, manager, and promoter of the sport.A word about the image, above. It is photograph of the trophies collected by the Atlantics of Brooklyn (1857-1875). The wooden frame holds a baseball from every game won by the team. The A.G. Spalding Collection contains only the photograph, not the baseballs.