I read Cabinet, and Monocle, and Art Forum, and I even puzzle out what little hiragana I remember to make limited sense of Hiroki Nakamura interviews in Huge or whatever. I read ID, and Fuck This Life, and sometimes Fantastic Man. But my favorite magazine of all time is Baseball Cards, published by Krause Publications until 1993, edited and basically written cover-to-cover by Kit Kiefer except for maybe one article an issue from a contributer. Anyway, Kiefer was responsible for the incredibly genial and light-hearted tone of the series, which left a lasting impression on me. I was going through my storage this week, and found my boxes of old issues.

SOOOOO

In the October 1988 issue there’s an article about the (beautiful, by the way) 1967 Topps set by M.L. Stapleton, a professor of English and Ovid scholar. As a way of teasing him about his field, Kiefer dropped in a sidebar of “Selected Reading: great works of literature that ought to be on the nightstand of every serious baseball-card collector:

Catch-22, Joseph Heller: You want Fleer packs because you can’t get them, but if you could get Fleer packs you wouldn’t want them. Takes place during World War II.

Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain: A boy, a river, a raft, and five vendor cases of ‘88 Topps to sort through. Tom Sawyer makes a guest appearance as an insert card.

The Odyssey, Homer: An epic poem which follows Ulysses as he attempts to complete a 1952 Topps set. After 16 years of wandering through card shows he returns home and is only recognized by his dog and his paperboy, who is awful sore at him for not paying his subscription all that time.

Romeo And Juliet: He likes to collect cards and loves her. She loves him but can’t figure out why he always has bubble gum on his breath. Her parents hate his parents. He gets a Don Mattingly rookie in a wax pack and bloodshed erupts.

The Canterbury Tales, Chaucer: A group of pilgrims on their way back to the National check into a Motel 6, order pizza and start swapping stories. The Wife Of Bath tells what actually goes on when Bath is at the card show.

Remembrance Of Things Past, Marcel Proust: A veteran collector muses about the good old days, when cards were cheap yet no one bought them, and no one dared make money on the hobby they loved. And the way baseball cards used to smell! Seventeen volumes.

Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka: A collector wakes up on morning and finds he has turned into a cockroach. He rents table space at a card show, sells Fleer wax packs for $2 each, and begins sleeping in a cheese sandwich.

The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald: All the glitter of the Jazz Age, the fast cars and endless parties and beautiful women, turns shallow and rotten when Gatsby doesn’t get his shipment of wax cases.

Heart Of Darkness, Joseph Conrad: Kurtz won’t come down on a ‘56 Topps Clemente, and the show site has no air conditioning.

Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte: The tempestous Catherine Earnshaw enters into a doomed and foolish marriage with the weak Edgar Linton and denies her true love, a 1975 Topps Ed Spezio.

Moby Dick, Herman Melville: A crazed captain (who looks and talks remarkably like Billy Martin) hunts down a great white whale who promised to hold a Pete Rose rookie for him.

Great Expectations, Charles Dickens: An ambitious young man spurns the virtues of his home when he discovers a rack pack with two Mattinglys showing. Giant snapping turtles eventually eat the pack, forcing him into an abject reunion with his family.”