The life story of Babe Ruth is so grandiose and larger than life that The Babe is certainly the only person qualified to tell it. In this book, “The Babe Ruth Story”, Ruth leads the reader on a winding tale from his days as a catcher on the St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys baseball team to the late 1940’s, when Ruth was the preeminent ambassador for the sport of baseball. This book, on its pristine red cover, touts itself as Ruth’s “only authenticated story”, and is filled with the Babe’s musings and tutorials on the sport he so thoroughly dominated. The inside cover and first page of this book features a pictorial representation of all 60 home runs Ruth hit in his majestic 1927 season, from the first he hit off Howard Ehmke to his final home run of the season, struck against Tom Zachary.

     This book, which would have run a customer $3.00 in 1948, is chock full of fascinating photographs of Ruth and his contemporaries, as well as his pet greyhound. This book was co-written with Bob Considine, a best-selling journalist and author, who, coincidentally, is interred in the same West Chester County cemetery as Ruth.

     Ruth has signed the title page of this first edition tome in black pen. This book was published in 1948, the year Ruth succumbed to an aggressive case of cancer. Due to Ruth’s tragic passing, he was only able to sign a limited number of copies of his autobiography, making this an incredibly rare piece of baseball and Americana memorabilia. It is a fitting tribute to one of the greatest athletes and American history, conjuring up images and memories of a nostalgia-laden time in baseball. This book comes with a LOA from JSA (Z58564).

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