I recently read the book The Catcher Was a Spy, a fascinating account of the life of Morris “Moe” Berg. Berg was a catcher for several major league baseball teams from the late 1920s to the early 1940s. While his record as a player wasn’t that great, he was one of the most quirky and interesting people ever to play baseball. He graduated from Princeton University and Columbia Law School, then worked for the OSS (the precursor of the CIA) during World War II. He was addicted to reading multiple newspapers a day, and spoke several languages. He studied in Paris for a time, and visited Japan and South America, all of which gave him the reputation of a globe-trotting intellectual among his fellow baseball players at a time when few of them shared such pursuits. It also gave him plenty to write about in notebooks!

The author of the book, Nicholas Dawidoff, notes that Moe Berg saved lots of the papers he accumulated during his life, including documents, menus, and ticket stubs. Dawidoff’s research for the book relied on various personal papers, letters, notebooks and photographs. Some of these materials are owned by private collectors but many are in archives, including 25 boxes at Princeton, which include notebooks, and other papers at the Columbia Law Library , the New York Public Library, and the Center for Jewish History.

A couple of his notebooks also ended up in auctions in recent years. The blue Pen-Tab notebook below was listed for sale twice, once when it didn’t sell and in a later listing that says it sold for $2,000. (I have a few Pen-Tab notebooks in my own collection of spiral notebooks, but their cover design is different.)

The red notepad below was also part of an auction lot. “Ready Wire-Glo” is a brand name I hadn’t seen before. There don’t seem to be any traces of it via Google search either…

It’s a bit hard to read Berg’s handwriting but apparently a lot of the notes related to his interest in languages and linguistics, as well as baseball, and his work for the OSS.

The Catcher Was a Spy is definitely worth reading if you enjoy baseball and/or unusual biographies. The notebooks are mentioned here and there in the book, but not shown– that’s what got me googling to see what I could find out about them! Another book called My Time with the Catcher Spy, Morris Moe Berg supposedly shows full color images of one of Berg’s notebooks, but I haven’t read it and couldn’t find any pictures of the interior online. But I’ll be keeping an eye out for any more auctions!

See my other posts about baseball-related notebooks.