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Bjarkman's often-reprinted coffetable pictorial will reappear in a fifth revised edition from World Publications (JG Press) in late summer of 2009. This will be the most recent of numerous reprintings for the popular gift book since its initial publication (1991) more that fifteen years ago.

This rare book contains 320 pages of the most famous ballplayers ever to play the game. Mays, Bench, Mantle, Mathewson, Ruth, Cobb, Walter Johnson--along with old team portraits, the 1955 Dodgers, the Casey Stengel Yankees--they are all here. Numerous black and white and color photos offset a charming interwoven text which captures the magic and lore of America's national pastime. This beautiful oversized coffee table volume was originally released in 1991 by Barnes and Noble under its Dorset Press imprint and has since undergone numerous updates and new editions. Four colorful sections laced with hundreds of photos explore:
The Magic of Baseball
The Art of Baseball
The Baseball Family
Take Me Out to the Ballgame

Baseball & the Game of Life: Stories for the Thinking Fan (Vintage Random House, 1991)

Also of interest to readers of baseball's multifarious creative literature will be Pete Bjarkman's pioneering edited collection of short stories--a marvelously diverse and literate collection which includes original works by Rober Coover, W.P. Kinsella and Jay Neugeborn.

American writers from Walt Whitman to Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth have been intrigued by baseball. Something about that "boy's game played by grown men"--its combination of chivalry and furious competitiveness, its otherworldly timelessness and its permanent aura of nostalgia, even its oddly "narrative" structure--seems to inspire extraordinary works of fiction.

Witness the fifteen stories in BASEBALL & THE GAME OF LIFE, which includes pieces by such designated hitters as Robert Coover, Jay Neugeboren, Luke Salisbury, and W.P. Kinsella (whose novel SHOELESS JOE inspired the popular film FIELD OF DREAMS). Here are a slapstick version of "Casey at the Bat," seen seen from the dazed perspective of the opposing pitcher; the sly tale of a Brooklyn sandlot team that recruits a juvenile deliquent as its star player; a tour de force of magical realism that turns a battered batter into a figure of Christian martyrdom and redemption. In other words, here are stories that treat every aspect of the human condition within the parameters of the baseball diamond, and do so with humor, imagination, and a wicked verbal spin.

Also featured is an introduction essay by Bjarkman on the scope of baseball fiction, plus a listing of critical additional readings in baseball fiction.

Copies of this long-out-of-print classic can still be found on the websites of many internet book dealers.