Where have all the big books gone?

I love big books and I cannot lie…

Okay, enough of that.

When I was in London, I stopped by Harrod’s where I found this in the sparse book department.

Look at the people in the background and you can get a sense of the size of this collection of photos by Annie Leibowitz. I might be misremembering, but I think the price was about £2,000.

I have a few oversized books in my collection, but nothing like this. Which circles back to my question: whatever happened to those doorstops? You know the kind I mean.

Baseball Extra, a collection of reprinted pages from newspapers, is probably the “tallest” of the lot. The Baseball Encyclopedia, probably the oldest — and thickest — in my library, weighs in at over 2,700 pages. The Ballplayers and The Dickson Baseball Dictionary are right up there, too.

I understand that the publishing industry has taken a hit with the increasing popularity of Kindle and kindle-like devices. Several years ago, I asked John Thorn why he had stopped producing the Total Baseball series. Not surprisingly, one of the main factors was the cost of production. Could you really expect a consumer to spend $60 every couple of years for what was basically the same thing with regards to its statistical portion. The essay portion was always top notch, but still.

The Hardball Times publishes in paperback and even they went from this to this to save some dough.

Coffee table books fall into this genre, too. I recently spoke with Kostya Kennedy about his new project, The Story of Baseball in 100 Photographs. It’s certainly not what I would call oversized, but here it’s a case of good things coming in relatively small packages. As for the larger tomes, to paraphrase Shakespeare, I think I shall not look upon its like again.