Baseball collection rounds the bases back to Mac
Each semester, the Archives welcomes many classes into our space for the purpose of conducting research using our collections. However, this past fall, we had a new experience in the Archives—the closing of a circle, if you will: a class titled Baseball: History and Literature, co-taught by history and English professors, came in to use our Elysian Fields Quarterly/Minneapolis Review of Baseball collection for their research. This collection, which was donated to us in the summer of 2023 by former editor Tom Goldstein, is the business archive and collected output of a literary journal (1981–2008) of writing on baseball from a fan’s perspective.
The journal was begun by Mac alum Ken LaZebnik ’76 and his friend Steve Lehman as a way to combine their twin loves of baseball and writing, and as the journal’s mission statement noted in the first issue, “to supply a rallying point for fan opinion.” The “closing of the circle” part of this story is that what originally spurred LaZebnik to create the journal was a class that he took as a student at Mac during the 1970s on baseball literature co-taught by English professors Harley Henry and Bob Warde.
However, the true closing of the circle moment came when the class arrived in the Archives to do their research, only to be greeted by Professor Warde, Steve Lehman, and Tom Goldstein, who were there to give substantial background on the collection and on the original Mac course that was the inspiration for the journal.
The Elysian Fields Quarterly/Minneapolis Review of Baseball collection contains an almost full run of the journal, accepted and rejected writing submissions and correspondence, original artwork, proofs, publicity and advertising materials, awards received, photographs, ephemera, and oversized promotional materials. It is fully processed and available for research by appointment.
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