Newly Discovered Original National Pastime Advertisement

I found another one

Newly Discovered Original National Pastime Advertisement

I discovered another original National Pastime advertisement just the other day.

On a whim, I decided to buy a copy of the December 1930 issue of Baseball Magazine.

While these old magazine issues are a little bit expensive, they’re not necessarily as rare as you might think. You usually see a few dozen of these sold every year online.

Anyway, I thought that there might be an advertisement for National Pastime — and I found it on page 48:

This is further evidence that Clifford Van Beek’s game was complete by December 1930. Van Beek would have had to submit this advertisement for publication before the magazine was published, which limits the time frame in which he could have had National Pastime printed by quite a bit.

While I don’t know exactly when this issue went to print, it’s clear that it was out by December 9, 1930, when this article about the issue was printed:

From The Binghamton Press, December 9, 1930, page 20

Of course, most people probably didn’t notice the small game advertised in the top right corner of a page near the back:

It is considerably bigger than the Sporting News ad, however.

And, frankly, the Baseball Magazine ad looks a lot better than the small one in The Sporting News:

Sure — part of that is from the poor quality of the microfilm scan, I’ll grant you that. But the Baseball Magazine ad was a bit larger — large enough to give the reader an idea about what kind of game this might be.

So which one do you think the young J. Richard Seitz saw?

By the way, it’s almost impossible to find scans of any issues of Baseball Magazine. However, I was able to scan this particular issue. Paying members can download it in the members area, along with a lot of other important pieces of baseball literature.