We love early sports publications to the point where it is difficult for us to write descriptions for them because we have a tendency to become enthralled with the articles spending hours reading when we should be researching and writing. When our consignor presented us with an entire year's worth of issues of The Sporting News we trembled with fear: this could be exactly the sort of thing to grind our productivity to a complete halt. Indeed when opening the box in which the publications arrived we removed the first handful of fragile newsprint issues for photography pieces only to be greeted by a front-page article comparing Yogi Berra with Roy Campanella in an effort to determine which catcher was the best. Which was the best? We had to know! A few days later we picked up another issue and were greeted with a fascinating headline: "Spiraling Major Payrolls Near 10 Million." Spiraling payrolls. Ten million dollars. We were struck by the headline and how important it must have seen in 1953 that baseball players collectively were nearing $10 million in aggregate salary. Today in his last season Yankee great Derek Jeter will earn $12 million - enough to pay the salary of all of major league baseball in 1953. See? This is what happens when we get a full year of The Sporting News from sixty years ago. We can't even write an accurate description because we're too busy discussing the irony in the headlines of just one of the issues. Please. Bid on this lot. We need to get it out of the office before we start reading again (and yes they're all well-worn and read over the years very fragile but still able to be opened and thankfully read).