Baseball Card Blogs » Cardboard Gods

Cardboard Gods: the paperback!

Josh Wilker — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 17:21:59 +0000

The “According to the Gods” 2011 team-by-team preview continues today with a stomach-churning look at Lou Piniella and the New York Yankees, but I wanted to also mention the rapidly approaching March 15 release date of the paperback version of Cardboard Gods, published by Algonquin Books.

I should be roaming the land a little bit in May and June for a handful of readings with a couple other Algonquin authors and, if all goes according to plan, free beer. I’ll be adding details as I get them to the Cardboard Gods “book tour” page.

Cardboard Gods followup…about one of our own.

Dinged Corners — Fri, 07 May 2010 00:00:00 +0000

There's no excuse for me, really. I'm busy, yeah. I've been taking extra courses and getting certifications and yada yada. I'm assistant-coaching volleyball, we're preparing for Lucy's birthday party (this Saturday, she'll be ten!); making lots of intricate plans for the next few months. Et cetera. All that by way of saying I think I missed an important development. But there's still no excuse.

Yesterday-ish, I posted a fairly thorough review of Josh Wilker's book Cardboard Gods. There were many elements that I didn't mention. For instance, at the end, the author includes an unusual dedication:

I'm sorry this doesn't scan well, but I have an advance proof copy of the book and the illustrated pages are fuzzy and don't come through clearly. The dedications are for Parent, Parent, Parent, Brother, and Wife and include vintage photos of each. The cards are based on the 1975 Topps design. When I saw this page, I almost became verklempt. It's really a lovely and compelling dedication format.

I appreciated it, but didn't look closely at the text of the acknowledgment page. There are many names but one stands out:

Yes, that's the development I missed. Punkrockpaint designed those cards for the dedication page. Apparently he's been too modest to say, "Look what I did!"

Beautiful, Travis.

Cardboard Gods: a baseball carding-of-age memoir.

Dinged Corners — Wed, 05 May 2010 23:52:00 +0000

"By the time I got this 1976 Steve Garvey card, my identity outside of baseball was as an outsider and a weirdo in my own town."

Recently I was contacted by Seven Footer Press to see if I might like a review copy of a new baseball card book. I'd perused the author's website so felt confident it would be a literate account of 1970s baseball cards, and I was right. But it is also more.

Josh Wilker, the author of Cardboard Gods: An All-American Tale Told Through Baseball Cards, had a complex youth in which he sought a sense of belonging but rarely found it except in cardboard. That is, he found a steady connection to the world at large through baseball cards, which came to represent to him constancy and serve as an unbreakable link to his older brother.

The author also has a website (Cardboard Gods) and some of the book's narrative appeared first there, such as in his posts about Rowland Office

or Mike Cosgrove. But the book does quite a bit more than refine his card bloggery. In this unusual memoir, the author pulls together stories of his growing up through talking about baseball players from 1974 to 1981 using baseball cards as touchstones. Mr. Wilker's signature style is to draw an emotionally intelligent direct line from a particular card and what it represents in the narrative of his own childhood.

We all have our own reasons for enjoying baseball cards. What got me started on collecting them was not a specific card or set, but a book. To many people, including me, the best baseball card book ever written is The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum book by Fred C. Harris and Brendan C. Boyd. All card blogs on earth certainly owe a debt of gratitude to these pioneers who simply looked at baseball cards and wrote about what they saw.

Cardboard Gods has a welcome, familiar Flippingesque ring, such as in Mr. Wilker's ruminations on players named Cy, or fantasies brought on by characteristics such as the usually-off-center appearance of 1975 Topps cards:

In years to come I'd wonder if the process of making cards that year was not standardized and mechanized at all but instead one that relied on the judgment and dexterity of a nineteen-year-old Coast Guard dropout named Smitty who'd just spent his break smoking a joint out by the Dumpster.

That sounds almost like Boyd and Harris, doesn't it? However, then comes this:

But when they first came into my hands, the mistakes riddling the 1975 set made the universe captured by the cards seem to my seventeen-year-old self to be homely, disheveled, approachable, as if my Mount Olympus was as close at hand as a bake sale advertised by mimeographed page tacked to an elementary school bulletin board. I needed to feel this closeness that year more than any other.

Reading reviews of Cardboard Gods on Amazon, one fleeting criticism I noticed is that more baseball and less personal narrative might have been preferable for some readers. In the first 30 pages or so I thought that also, but soon became drawn in to the seamless connection that Mr. Wilker makes between collecting baseball cards and building an emotional anchor in a tumultuous life.

One beauty of Mr. Wilker's approach is that it connects the reader back to something that's truly been lost: the importance of baseball cards to kids. Remember them? Kids?

Before amassers, before eBay auctions, before high-end collectors, before hyping Honus Wagner, kids handed sweaty quarters to small shop proprietors and tucked packs of cards into their back pockets. Then they went and opened those packs of cards hoping to find favorite players, seeking cards they didn't have yet. Sometimes they were disappointed and found mostly doubles. Sometimes they found their favorite player or a major star. They traded cards, flipped them, spoked them, created games around them. These kids' main card containment units were shoeboxes and rubber bands. The purity and simplicity of the card collecting past almost brings a tear to my eye. Mr. Wilker skillfully draws from this lost power.

I won't reveal the full poignant scope of this memoir because it will diminish your enjoyment of Mr. Wilker’s enviable talents as a storyteller. But here's a hint. He knows well that baseball cards mean more to many fans and collectors than the game itself, than the act of collecting. What better way to build connections than with people who have a shared interest? When Josh Wilker looks at baseball cards, he sees a web of shared experience, heritage, history, and hope, and thanks to his writing skill, we know exactly what he is saying.

The final page includes a hat tip to Harris and Boyd, the latter of whom even surfaced briefly to provide an appreciative blurb for Wilker's Cardboard Gods, which is now my second favorite book of all time about baseball cards.

And The Winner Is . . . .

Rob- AKA "Guido" — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 05:53:00 +0000

If you can't read this, beardy, is the winner.
Email me your address at thevotc@gmail.com

Giveaway- Cardboard Gods

Rob- AKA "Guido" — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 14:00:00 +0000

Last month you may remember that I received an reviewed advance copy of the book "Cardboard Gods" by Josh Wilker author of the blog of the same name. The publisher was nice enough to provide a hard cover version for me to giveaway.

All you have to do to be eligible to win is to leave a comment answering this question. When you close your eyes and think of baseball cards, what is the first card that comes to mind?

That's it. I'll take entries until next Friday night at 10pm CST.

Cardboard Gods – Book Review

Rob- AKA "Guido" — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 01:18:00 +0000

If you are reading this article or a regular visitor to the site, you will, in all likelihood identify with Josh Wilker and the esoteric musings contained within his book Cardboard Gods. An introspective autobiography that goes beyond the typical oratorical deliberations of a self-promoting book of this nature, instead Wilker uses the memories of his childhood baseball card collection to weave an, at times, convoluted look back at his, anything but normal upbringing.

In all honesty, I would never read an autobiography about someone I don’t know, have never met, and in all likelihood, never will. However, this is far from an autobiography and despite being unfamiliar with the author prior to reading this manuscript, I feel a connection to Wilker that transcends the normal confines of traditional human interaction. You see, Josh is one of us, a collector and blogger- one that you, in fact, may be familiar with through his writing at http://www.cardboardgods.net/. He is a brilliant orator who has the capability of spinning a complete narrative from a single baseball card.

Taking his blog to the next level was a natural progression for his entertaining writing talents. Published by Seven Footer Press and available nationwide next month. The book reads much like a blog with short anecdotal chapters focused on a specific card, from a specific year equating to a particular memory from Wilker’s childhood. The back cover defines the book brilliantly with this quote, “Cardboard Gods is more than just the story of a man who can’t let go of his past, it’s proof that- to paraphrase Jim Bouton (former MLB pitcher and author of the controversial title, Ball Four)- as children we grow up holding baseball cards but in the end we realize that it’s really the other way around.” These words ring true for me today more than 30 years since opening my first pack of baseball cards. Cardboard memories of simpler times when pick-up games of sandlot ball, Slurpees, the park district swimming pool and baseball cards defined not only summer, but childhood.

A life-long, die-hard Red Sox fan, Wilker and his brother share a bond with millions of fans from Red Sox Nation. From childhood hero Carl Yastrzemski to vanquished Billy Buckner and to the triumphant titles of the last decade, Wilker intertwines his cardboard tales with yarns about life as a Boston fan and Yankees hater. However, readers need not worry that the book’s cardboard focus is weighted with any team biased or player collector slant.

What really impressed me about this book is something in my own collecting habits I have, at times, taken for granted. Wilker’s careful attention to detail is thoroughly conveyed by the unique revelations of the often over-looked photo backgrounds, statistical and biographic data on the card’s back.

Far from being a “can’t put it down page-turner”, Cardboard Gods is best read in doses, allowing, the often times, thought provoking revelations to permeate your subconscious. In so doing, you will find your mind exercising its memory recall with your own cardboard and childhood memories. Unlike most books that simply end, the story continues every day for Wilker and his followers, online, at http://www.cardboardgods.net/.

Cardboard Gods: Reggie Jackson, 1976

Cardboard Gods — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 01:24:00 +0000

(Note: The following is my farewell to the disbanding Baseball Toaster; the ongoing travelogue-in-cardboard Somewhere I lost Connection will resume at the new location of Cardboard Gods.) A god stands in a moment of contemplative reflection. Shadows give way to sun as he readies to move into the center of attention, that bright stage he was born to command. Behind him, the faces in the crowd that will watch his every move have been blurred to something like Monet's lily pads, those hypnotic omens of the inevitable dusk into which we'llall dissolve, as if the card was meant to whisper that all names, even those of the greatest among us, will eventually unravel to silence. In fact, the whole card aches with transience: by the time it thrummed in the palms of the boys of America the superduperstar had moved on, traded to Baltimore, the regal joy of the cards blazing gold uniform a lie. The most magnificent team of the Cardboard God era became an empty golden shell for the remainder of my childhood.

Cardboard Gods: Dave Skaggs

Cardboard Gods — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:00:00 +0000

Somewhere I Lost Connection (continued from Larry Hardy)

Cardboard Gods: Larry Hardy

Cardboard Gods — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 17:21:00 +0000

Somewhere I Lost Connection (continued from Tom Brunansky)

Cardboard Gods: Tom Brunansky

Cardboard Gods — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:47:00 +0000

Somewhere I Lost Connection Chapter Two (continued from Terry Bulling)