The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book is a book written by Brendan C. Boyd & Fred C. Harris about baseball cards, primarily ones issued during the 1950s and 1960s, and the players on the cards. The book was published by Little, Brown & Co. in October 1973, creating a nostalgia for baseball books like The Boys of Summer published two years earlier. After several years of being out of print, Seamhead Books reprinted the book in April 2015, with some new contents. Authors Neither Brendan C. Boyd nor Fred C. Harris had published any books nor possessed any special expertise in the field of sports or sports memorabilia when they decided to write The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book. In 1970 while both were employed at a Boston, Mass. bookstore, a customer inquired about books on baseball cards. Surprised to learn that there weren't any works on the subject, Harris told Boyd, "we should write one." So they pored over the cards they had collected in their youth and wrote The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book. Although the book doesn't indicate which author contributed which parts, generally Boyd covered players from the American League and Harris those in the National League. Publication of the book was probably aided by the 1972 publication of Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer, which rekindled interest in 1950s baseball. Brendan C. Boyd wrote another book, published in 1993, titled Blue Ruin: A Novel of the 1919 World Series. Subject Matter "The Great American Baseball Card Flipping, Trading and Bubble Gum Book," presents a humorous and usually irreverent account of the baseball cards that were distributed during the authors' youths and of the players depicted on the cards. The basic format consists of an image of a card of a player, or in a few instances a manager or umpire, accompanied by a short characterization of the card and the player. The commentary for each card ranges from a single sentence to a few hundred words. Unlike most sports-related publications, the vast majority of players featured in this book possessed mediocre talent and had been largely forgotten by 1973. The book is not a baseball card guide in any respect and makes no pretense of being one—there's no indication what a card is worth or even that it has any