OUR NATIONAL PASTIME PUTS ON ITS GAME FACE.

• Position: WHATS NEW? - Game Faces: Early Baseball Cards from the Library of Congress - Book review

Game Faces: Early Baseball Cards from the Library of Congress, a 155-page hardcover book with more than 300 images, offers fans of the Grand Old Game--as well as historians--a visual delight that showcases baseball cards from the 19th and early 20th centuries alongside photos from the early days of the National Pastime.

Author Peter Devereaux takes readers behind the scenes of the Library of Congress' Benjamin K. Edwards Collection to see the vibrant world of the early boom of baseball. Devereaux is a writer-editor at the Library of Congress and author of The Card Catalog: Books, Cards, and Literary Treasures. Game Faces accompanies the Library's ongoing exhibition "Baseball Americana," which is open through June 2019.

Published in October by Smithsonian Books, Game Faces is the first book to explore the Library's extensive collection of early baseball cards, providing both the history and cultural context that reveals these cards as documents of their times as well as their teams.

In the 1880s, more than half of the population lived in rural areas without major league baseball teams of their own. Since pictures were rare in...