House of Cards: Baseball Card Collecting and Popular Culture Volume 12

Bloom's well-researched study of baseball collectors in the 1980s is a wonderful text for studying and teaching about masculinity and popular culture. His book raises important questions about the crisis of masculinity in the latter part of the twentieth century, and the ways that popular culture practices like baseball card collecting both challenged and, ultimately, shored up traditional gender boundaries between men and women. Bloom's work also focuses extensively on the issue of nostalgia, particularly the idealized memory of 1950s American boyhoods. An accessible and engaging tone makes this a fine text to use in popular culture classes or in gender studies classes.

As a baseball card collector for over 20 years, I have read countless articles in countless publications about baseball cards and card collecting. Almost every one of the has focused on either the financial aspects of the hobby or on how great it is to be a collector. John Bloom has written a thought provoking and academic book which examines WHY we collect.While I do not agree with some of the authors positions, specifically about race and homoerotocism, I feel that they are well thought out and presented. His description of the MCC, a card collectors club, is very similar to my own experiences in the two clubs to which I have belonged in the past, and offers a unique look at the pettiness and power struggles that often arise in these organizations.Many collectors and hobby writers came out very strongly against this book, but I think that many of them looked at Blooms' conclusions as an attack on the hobby of card collecting. They are not.While the academic tone of the book can make it difficult to read at times, the insights that it offers and the fact that it at least makes the reader THINK about the nature of collecting are reason enough to read "House of Cards".