In a game so steeped in tradition and history that it fairly oozes both Major League Baseball delights in triple-digit anniversaries like no other major professional sport and it has so many of them. Just this spring when the Los Angeles Dodgers and Arizona Diamondbacks squared off against one another to open the 2014 major league season in Sydney Australia it marked the 100th anniversary of a fabled world tour in 1913-14 that sent many of the brightest stars of that era on as grand a world tour as had ever been contemplated.

This remarkable artifact the 1913-14 Major League Baseball World Tour Stereoscopic Travel Book is essentially a souvenir yearbook if you will from that historic tour engineered by a pair of Hall of Famers Charles Comiskey and John McGraw a five-month sortie around the globe that had members of the White Sox and New York Giants (mostly) squaring off in exhibition contests on five continents either against each other or against local teams. The tour loosely fashioned after an 1888 World Tour orchestrated by another legendary figure from the games earliest years Albert G. Spalding was in fact designed to far surpass the Spalding undertaking which ultimately was seen by many to have been little more than a promotional vehicle to market Spaldings vast inventory of baseball and sports equipment.

The tour began with a nod to baseballs origins in Cincinnati Ohio in October of 1913 and continued across the country with exhibition contests held at cities large and small. Starting out aboard the R.M.S. Empress of Japan (other ships would be utilized at later points in the tour) and sailing from Vancouver British Columbia on November 19 a group of more than five dozen would sail to Japan China Australia British Ceylon Egypt Italy France and Great Britain. Hall of Famers McGraw and Comiskey headlined a group that also included the legendary Jim Thorpe recruited for the Giants club and only recently stripped of his Olympic medals in arguably the most shameful injustice in the checkered annals of the ironically named amateur athletics; Tris Speaker clearly the greatest player on the trip and a notoriously squeamish sailor; Wahoo Sam Crawford a teammate of Ty Cobb (he had been invited but perhaps mercifully for the rest of the tourists had said no) and fellow Hall of Famer; umpire Bill Klem another who would find himself inducted into the games Hall of Fame still 25 years into the future; and Red Faber a young White Sox hurler who would solidify his own credentials with the boss en route to his own later date with immortality even though a Giants pitching shortfall prompted his being loaned to McGraw for much of the tour. Ultimately the group would return to the United States in March of 1914 sailing from Liverpool England to New York aboard the Lusitania another ship fraught with historical significance.

The souvenir yearbook offered here presents two unique aspects in establishing itself as a remarkable artifact: a simply extraordinary two-page autograph format portfolio near the front of the book containing literally dozens of autographs of the seafaring immortals and a layout of more than 100 photographs from the tour that the publisher hoped would be purchased in stereoscopic panels for the turn-of-the-century equivalent of 3-D viewing. The book itself published by the London Stereoscopic Company featured full-page advertisements for their patented Stereoscopic Viewers along with prices and ordering information to select specific images to be converted into the side-by-side image format that created the 3-D illusion.

Still its the autographs that startle and intrigue in the 60-page 10-by-12-inch book with hardbound front and back covers. On the autograph layout spread a fascinating diagram of the captains table features small circles with the signatures of many of the dignitaries who tagged along on the tour with the tourists as the teams and their management were referred to penning stunning fountain pen signatures on the two-page layout that features small squares roughly the size of a modern business card arrayed in a haphazard fashion.

Here then appears the signatures of McGraw and Comiskey the two major forces who put it all together signing along with their wives who gamely made the trip as well. On the first page Tris Speaker has signed in one of the boxes adding his inscription of his beloved Hubbard Texas; nearby is a square with a sensational Jim Thorpe autograph with the legendary figure adding a poignant inscription below of Lo the Poor Indian. In all there are more than four dozen autographs on the two pages with a second Thorpe signature turning up on the facing page this time a Mr. and Mrs. Thorpe along with Turkey Mike Donlin Laughing Larry Doyle Buck Weaver and Sam Crawford to name a few.

As noted the signatures are simply incredible; the book itself entitled on the hardbound cover Great Britain: A Voyage with the Mails is also in fine condition jostled only marginally by some separation of the hardbound covers from the spine though nothing that detracts from the overall presentation. The images 103 original photographs in all are in similarly superb condition the vast majority protected by still-intact slip sheets. Each takes the viewer along with the tourists for the epic journey portraying the Rock of Gibraltar Pompeii Naples the still-unfinished Suez Canal the Red Sea and Colombo along with chronicling such on-board activities as tug of war boxing matches (presumably not between McGraw and his longtime nemesis Klem) sack races ladies in spectacular hats shuffleboard spoon races and an activity curiously described as Slinging the Monkey exact explanation unclear but something that certainly sounds like fun.

This is an absolutely unique artifact truly museum-worthy in every respect and a rare opportunity for world tour fans and autograph collectors.

Includes a full LOA from PSA/DNA.