Two New Uni-Adjacent Books for Your Consideration

Hello! Paul here. As we move toward holiday shopping season, I wanted to let you know about two new books. Just to be clear, I have no stake in either of these volumes — they just came across my radar and I thought they would be of interest to Uni Watch readers.

Let’s go one book at a time, beginning with…

The Modern Baseball: History of MLB Through the Art of the Logoball, by Tyler Burton

(12″ x 12″, 218 pages, self-published)

Some baseball collectors specialize in game-used balls, others specialize in foul balls, and still others specialize in autographed balls. But Tyler Burton has a more unusual sub-niche: He’s fascinated by balls that are stamped with commemorative logos. For example, all the balls for the just-completed World Series carried the World Series logo, and all the balls at Phillies home games this past season were stamped with a stadium-anniversary logo. Those types of balls — logoballs — are Burton’s jam, and he celebrates them in his new coffee table book, The Modern Baseball.

The first thing you notice about this book is that it’s heavy. That’s because it’s been printed on very high-quality paper. In fact, all of the production values here (photography, design, printing, binding, etc.) are superb, which is all the more impressive considering that Burton published this book himself. I’ve never seen a self-published title that’s such a stunning physical specimen.

The text and editorial details, however, do bear many of the hallmarks of a self-published book. Copy editing and proofreading frequently come up short, phrasing and transitions are often awkward, even-numbered pages are on the right side of each spread instead of the left, and Burton doesn’t even provide an introductory segment to explain why he’s so passionate about logoballs to begin with (an inexplicable omission).

That said, most people don’t buy coffee table books for the text, so the book’s physical and visual strengths may be enough to satisfy you (or that logoball enthusiast on your gift list). Here are some of the interior spreads:

The book is available in both hardcover and paperback editions ($100 and $45, respectively). Both versions are available here, and Uni Watch readers can get a 10% discount by using the code UW10 at checkout.

Okay, next up is…

Bowlarama: The Architecture of Mid-Century Bowling, by Chris Nichols with Adriene Biondo

(9.5″ x 9.5″, 208 pages, Angel City Press)

If you’re into the visual history of bowling, especially during the postwar period in southern California — not just as kitschy retro nostalgia but as a seriously interesting topic — you could do a lot worse than the new book Bowlarama. It’s not quite a coffee table book, but it has a lot of great photos, along with informative text about the bowling’s evolution from a tavern game to a major cultural force in mid-century America.

The book’s subtitle, which refers to “architecture,” is a bit misleading, or at least incomplete. Yes, author Chris Nichols, a longtime SoCal historian and preservationist, devotes plenty of space to the entertaining Googie architecture that characterized so many mid-century bowling centers, but the book also has coverage of bowling alleys’ interior designs, in-house entertainment, technological advances (pinspotters replacing pinboys, e.g.), and more. It’s a solid overview of the sport’s heyday.

Here a representative sampling of the interior pages:

The book is available here.