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THBMoe Berg Handwritten Notebook and Signed Check
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About Auction
LiveMay 18, 2023
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- Lot Description
Baseball catcher (1902-1972) who also served briefly as a spy for the United States. Casey Stengel once described Berg as 'the strangest man ever to play baseball.' Moe Berg’s red ‘Ready Wire-Glo’ spiral-bound pocket notepad, 3.25 x 5.5, which features a total of 39 pages annotated in Berg’s hand and is signed twice with his initials, “M. B.” Dated to March 1960, the notebook contains Berg’s comments on language and communication, as well quotations from various authors regarding the issues of language and translation. Various excerpts include: “8 people—meet under clock @ Biltmore @ 8 P.M.”; “M. B. on communication before discussion‰Û_oral, written, misunderstandings, Oral, Enunciation, Pronunciation, —names-taboo—no last names, royalty—Hirohito, Tenno Heika—Matsumoto (Hiroshima)”; “Written, handwriting—abbreviation in French”; “Written—Japanese can’t read their own lingo=read it different ways,—alphabet—syllabaries—families of language”; “Romanic—Slavic—Germanic—English—Celtic, Latin, Danish”; “—Semantics, Michel Breal 1896”; “—Semantics, ‘democracy’ to Hitler, Stalin & Roosevelt”; ““@ U.N. during Korean debate M.B. ‘we’d understand him (Korean delegate) better if he spoke Korean”; ““M. B. during war let Europeans speak their own lingo (rather than English) even @ expense of losing something”; “Language & the Law, Fred’k Philbrick, MacMillan 1949, ‘lawyers are students of language by profession”;“Othello of Iago: ‘This honest creature doubtless sees and knows more, much more, than he unfolds’”; “I. A. Richards: the meaning of a word is the missing part of its context, dictionaries follow usage—they do not decide or lead it.” Also includes a National Newark & Essex Banking Co. check, 6.25 x 2.75, filled out and signed by Berg, made payable to Cash for $100, February 28, 1953. In very good to fine condition, with the check very faded but still legible.
In 1923, Berg graduated from Princeton University with a degree in modern languages (he learned seven: Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, Italian, German and Sanskrit) and soon after signed with the Brooklyn Robins (Dodgers), his first major league contract. He played on several teams in the following seasons as shortstop and catcher while working on a law degree from Columbia University, which he finished in 1930 after passing the New York state bar exam. He played his last five seasons with the Boston Red Sox from 1935 to 1939. After parts of seventeen seasons in the big leagues, Berg was hired by the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, as an international spy. His mission was to seek knowledge concerning Germany's progress in the development of atomic weapons, resulting in his traveling to Europe to meet with Scherrer, the director of physics at the Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. - Shipping Info
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