Super cool pocket softcover from 1956. 4 x 3 inches. 320 pages of essential baseball info. Do you know which spitball pitchers were grandfathered in 1920? In 1944, Hy Turkin, a New York Daily News reporter, and S.C. Thompson, a part-time statistician at the Elias Baseball Bureau, began work on expanding, "The Baseball Cyclopedia," published in 1922. Turkin and Thompson completed the first edition of the "Official Encyclopedia of Baseball" in 1951. The encyclopedia was published by A.S. Barnes Co. and updated in 1956. The same year, in 1956, A.S. Barnes Co. published a vest pocket version of the book for The Gillette Co. The 320 page Vest Pocket Encyclopedia of Baseball came with the Gillette Super Speed Razor set. Especially condensed for Gillette, the book edited by Hy Turkn and S.C. Thompson, is crammed with facts, figures; World Series statistics, ballpark diagrams, League leaders since 1876, Complete Major League active rosters, all players active through 1955 with their nicknames, birth dates, lifetime records, how they bat, throw, and much more.