As the White Sox made history this fall, University of Illinois librarians discovered that someone may have made off with copies of a rare sports newspaper chronicling the team’s darkest chapter.
A librarian at the Urbana-Champaign campus said Monday that two bound volumes of Collyer’s Eye from the 1920s are missing, including articles about the 1919 White Sox gambling scandal that spawned the nickname Black Sox.
The newspaper, a weekly sports and gambling tabloid popular with horse racing fans, was published from about 1913 until at least 1948. There are no other publicly accessible copies of the newspapers now missing from the university’s collection, several librarians and sports researchers said.
University librarians discovered that the volumes were gone this fall, about the same time White Sox players were on their way to winning the team’s first World Series in 88 years.
“As there was more and more interest in what the White Sox were doing, we began receiving more questions about their history,” said Karen Schmidt, associate university librarian for collections. “As those questions began to mount, we began to understand the volumes were missing and that they are very, very rare.”
The library had every Collyer’s Eye edition from 1919 to 1944 bound in 17 volumes, Schmidt said. Library officials now are working with university police to find the books. Collyer’s, credited by baseball historians with first revealing the scandal, reported on Oct. 18, 1919, days after the end of the World Series, the names of White Sox players who allegedly fixed the games. The university library still has a copy of that story contained in an earlier volume, but several articles prior to the grand jury indictment are part of the missing books.
“They were publishing the names of players and gamblers and nobody else was doing that,” said Gene Carney, whose book, “Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball’s Cover-up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded,” is expected to be published in March.
