Question for the Community - Negro League Book

[aljurgela]

Hello friends,

As most of you know, I have an extensive Negro League collection and have shared a large part of it over the years on a number of threads here at Net54. I also receive many direct messages, ebay messages and messages from the SGC registry that ask for my opinion and guidance. I try to be as responsive as I can be to those requests and I ultimately decided to try and "codify" my knowledge and thoughts in a book about Negro League cards. Much has been written about NL history, and I think that Phil Garry's Negro League Baseball Collectibles Guide is a fantastic reference book for cards,collectibles and other items. Of particular interest to me was the Appendix I in his book which lays out the "Top Negro League Baseball Cards of All-Time". It was a great list and debated somewhat on net54, which was fun. Most of those who had opinions had extensive knowledge of the cards (and in fact owned many of them). I thought that the conversation was so rich that it could be explored in more depth. I also felt that many were left out of that conversation due to the fact that a lot of the "base information" was not (and still is not) widely known/broadcast.

So, my question to the community is to try to understand if there is a "market" for a book of the top Negro League cards (only cards). I see this to include scans of every card (front and back), a write up of the card and issue and why it is placed in its given slot, pop report numbers (SGC & PSA) and public and private sales when available.

I am sure that the printing costs for a small run would be on the high side, but I wanted to gauge the community thoughts here and if there is interest, I would likely start with a book on just the Negro League HOF cards (which is what most people contact me about). Then I would move to the non-HOFer Negro League cards (a much bigger project - likely just for the die-hards). If these prove successful, I would probably move to the global football/soccer cards, which is daunting, but do-able over a number of years.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts.