Women at Play and Libraries

In my previous blog I wrote about my best-known book, Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball, which is now available as an ebook.

First published twenty-five years ago by Harcourt, Women at Play went into a second printing, and then, eventually, it went out of print. But it has had a long and interesting life through baseball book collectors, through stores that sell used books, and also through libraries. I’m particularly fond of and amused by the way Women at Play has gone into libraries, out of them, and then back into them.

When the book was first published, many, many libraries purchased copies, probably because Women at Play was the first book to present the history of women who played hardball. Soon, however, there were many more books on the subject. For at least ten years, though, I could find a copy of Women at Play in just about any library I visited almost anywhere in the country.

But just as libraries buy books, so they divest themselves of books due to limited shelf space and the need to buy new titles as they come out. Eventually Women at Play was taken out of some library collections. But libraries love books and would not destroy them — the library copies were either sold or donated and ended up online. If you typed “Women at Play” into Amazon, you could (and probably still can) choose from among five to ten online sellers . . . many of whom specified that the copy you would receive was an ex library book. Which is how I learned that libraries were taking Women at Play off their shelves.

But here’s the amusing thing. I intended to organize my thousands of pages of research notes on women in baseball and donate them to the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library. (See Cooperstown Bound: Third Time’s a Trip). Before I did that, though, I ended up publishing the public-domain part of my notes in a three-volume collection titled Research Notes for Women at Play. I published Volume I in 2010.

Perhaps because Research Notes was an unusual book, or perhaps because they remembered Women at Play, many libraries (both public and academic) purchased copies of Volume I.

The existence of Research Notes led to a renewed interest in Women at Play itself. And libraries that had divested themselves of the original title now ended up rebuying that title so that, in addition to having Volume I on hand, they could also have the actual work on hand. Because Women at Play was out of print, libraries ended up buying used copies of it through Amazon and other venues. I like to think that somewhere, at least one library purchased back its own book.

There’s something about this circle of in-out-in that makes me smile.

Now I’m hoping that the existence of Research Notes on library shelves makes libraries want to buy the ebook edition of Women at Play.

 

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To purchase the 25th anniversary edition of Women at Play: The Story of Women in Baseball, click here.