Beschreibung:

Title: Rare promotional poster and letters for the first American college sports magazine, 1897 Author: Place: Publisher: Date: 1897 Description: (Promotional poster) "The College Athlete / An Entirely New Magazine…The First National College Magazine [on]… Football, Baseball, Track Athletics, Rowing, Tennis and Golf." Promoting the first issue, appear in May 1897. 9 x 13”, with color logo and black-an d-white engraving of runners (Boston, 1897) Very rare, as are all issues of this first American collegiate sports magazine, which ended the following year. With: 3 1-pg. printed letters (and one original mailing envelope) on College Athlete Publishing Co. stationery. Boston April 8 and May 5, 1897, and one undated. One addressed to J.E.Brown Worcester, Mass., signed by Samuel Abbott. The other unsigned. Soliciting both subscriptions and literary contributions, including “detailed account of base ball games and track meetings” and photographs of base ball and track team captains”. This first “manly, straightforward” magazine was (according to newspaper reports) still appearing in the fall of 1898, but WorldCat locates only one sparse institutional holding – the first two numbers being held by Notre Dame. Though most of the stock of the publishing company was owned by rich Harvard, Princeton and Yale alumni, Abbott, the guiding spirit, himself a product of the Eastern Ivy League, was careful to include articles about sports at the Universities of Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Chicago, and to print pieces that ran the athletic gamut, from accounts by Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Williams and Brown “footballers”, to a review of Lawn Tennis (as played, of course, by men). Lot Amendments Condition: Very good. Item number: 271745