Discovery: Damned Charming Victorian-Era Baseball Clip Art

So far as the author knows, it is not the case that the genre commonly referred to as “clip art” — it isn’t the case that clip art was either (a) ubiquitous or even (b) extant at all during the Victorian era. What he does know (i.e. what that same author knows) is that, in the present — an epoch commonly denoted as the Kate Middleton Topless Photos Era™ — a thing available even to people who went to state schools of the American South is this wide-ranging and conspicuously charming collection of Victorian clip art made possible, it would appear, by the Florida Center for Instructional Technology.

Among the images included in said collection are a number concerning the rules and equipage of the Pastime.

Like this one, for example, which appeared originally in Everybody’s Cyclopedia and illustrates quite clearly the most relevant dimensions of a base-and-ball field:

And like this second image, for example, of men inspecting a bat in what one hopes isn’t an immodest fashion — which image appeared in St. Nicholas: An Illustrated Magazine for Young People:

And this third — not of baseball, this time, but of a game called Sling the Monkey that’s probably be racist — which appeared in Meek’s Home Library of Entertainment, Instruction and Amusement: