Thursday, April 16, 2015

Cubs Roster Books 1958 - 1967

While doing a little background checking for yesterday's post, I realized that I've never done an in-depth look at the Cubs media guides / roster books.  In fact, I didn't even have scans of most of the covers.

Starting with today's post, that is going to change.  I've gone ahead and scanned the covers of all 58 of my books and I'll be showing them over the next four days.

The first Cubs roster book showed up at Wrigley Field in 1958.  For 25¢ you could buy a 32 page book with bios and stats for all the current players, plus historical information on the team and Wrigley Field.  The book's dimensions were small, measuring just 4½" x 7".

There was a spring edition and then the regular edition, which was updated a few times during the season.

The number of pages in the book varied, some with as many as 48.  But for ten years, from 1958 - 1967, the format was pretty much the same.

 

 

 

 

 

You can see a definite design theme throughout.  The color scheme is always the same - blue, red, and white...Cubs colors.  With the exception of 1963, all of the covers have a geometric-based design.  The last three years share the same design as the game schedule for those seasons (you can see the schedules from the entire 1960s here)

The price remained pretty constant too.  For the first eight years it was 25¢ and then was raised to 50¢ in 1966.

The height of the book grew in 1968 from 7" to 9" and tomorrow I'll have a look at a 14-year run of those taller books.  I'll wrap up today with a tile of the ten:





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