But that doesn't matter one bit. This is less a baseball book than the intertwined tales of two remarkable characters. Their story is brash and brawling and delightfully all-American. PAUL ADOMITES' next book is Pennsylvania Crude: Boomtowns and Oil Barons. He is also Book Review Editor of this journal, and can be reached at [email protected]. In the Beginning Review by Andrew Milner Baseball (1845-1881): From the Newspaper Accounts, Preston D. Orem. Self pub- lished, 1961. 359 pages. From the vantage point of the early 21st century, almost half a century since Pre- ston D. Orem's Baseball (1845-1881): From the Newspaper Accounts was privately pub- lished, it is easy to focus on the book's weaknesses: More often than not Orem never lists the actual newspapers he quotes from, and when he does he omits the date of the article in question; it can be difficult to determine where the newspaper quotes leave off and Orem's narrative begins; the introductory "Origin of Baseball" chapter relies too much on now discredited sources; readers weaned on such belletrists as Peter Morris and Lee Allen may find Orem's workmanlike prose slow-going; and so on. Yet while a read- ing of Orem's book reveals its flaws, it also shows why, imperfections and all, so many baseball minds admire it. It is astonishing what Orem was able to accomplish without any semblance of today's baseball research infrastructure. A decade before the Society for American Base- ball Research was founded, Orem helped chronicle the earliest years of organized base- ball. Before publication of Macmillan's 1969 Baseball Encyclopedia or David Nemec's Great Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Major League Baseball, he attempted a season- by-season account of the earliest years of organized baseball, occasionally including ros- ters with players' ages. Before the opening of the National Baseball Library in Cooperstown, Orem crossed the United States to study newspapers from the graduate libraries at Stanford and UCLA to public libraries in Baltimore, Cincinnati, Louisville, New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis. Only one year after the publication of the first volume of Harold Seymour's baseball histories, and likely without benefit from Sey- mour's work, Orem wrote extensively about the financial setup of the first National Asso- ciation and National League teams. It's probably healthier to see this book as the equivalent of the 1951 Turkin-Thompson baseball encyclopedia (one of the few refer- ence books Orem acknowledges in his foreword). Orem may not have been the most complete historian of 19th century baseball but, as with Turkin and Thompson, one can conclude Orem deserves credit for being among the very first. Another obvious conclusion is that Orem simply loved 19th century sportswriting. He devoted much of his text to direct quotes from player profiles (if again these quotes are rarely directly sourced). There is this from an 1868 newspaper article accusing mem- bers of the Cincinnati Red Stockings and Cincinnati Buckeyes of drug use, with uncanny resemblance to 2009 baseball: "Keep on, youth! Drug and barter and bet and bicker and pretty soon there will be a general burst. Then ball playing will be practiced for pleas- ure and the players' business will not be as profitable." From an 1874 New York Herald 118 Base Ball^ll (Spring 2010)