Purpose of B18 Blankets

[cubman1941]

This is from Issue 003 of Shoeless Notes, the email newsletter for the Shoeless Joe Jackson Museum and Baseball Library in Greenville, South Carolina. Maybe others knew this but I sure didn't.

"When we do find out something we never knew before, it’s such an exciting thing! To be able to share it with you, to be able to make that history come alive, it makes the hours and hours of digging through old newspaper clippings and searching through digital archives worth it. On June 11, John Thorn learned something new.

John is the Official Historian of Major League Baseball, and, without hyperbole, he probably knows more about baseball than anyone who has ever lived on this planet. The fact that even John is still learning new things proves my earlier point: it’s impossible for anyone to know everything. But John didn’t just learn something that he didn’t know… he learned something that possibly less than 10 people currently living knew. He learned what the 1914 B18 Blankets were originally intended to be.

Which takes us back to John Thorn, who was doing some reading on June 11, and came across an entry on NYHistory.org which very casually told him precisely what he didn’t even know he was looking to learn that day:
A white cotton felt cloth pen wipe, printed with a central image of a baseball player marked "Jackson", surrounded by pennants marked "Cleveland" and "A.L." for American League, with green borders decorated with purple corner blocks resembling bases, with baseball items in each block including a ball, a mitt, crossed bats and a catcher's mask. Part of a collectible series of baseball team felts given as a premium by cigar stores and manufacturers for blotting the ink from a nib pen.

So there we have it! 106 years after their creation, the world knows once again what these “blankets” were originally intended to be: pen wipes."