“… I ended up with exactly that, an immaculate gem of a book. The book is called Diamonds are Forever: Artists and Writers on Baseball and, just as the title suggests, it’s a rich collection of artwork, poetry, and essays on the eternal aura of the game of baseball. It’s a pretty large book, soft-cover but the size of an art book or so-called ‘coffee table’ book (I’ve never owned a coffee table but I’ve got a bunch of these type of books) and it was published by Chronicle Books, a San Francisco-based publisher who seems to produce just about every highly awesome artsy book I come across. … The apparent polar opposite of most of the baseball literature I read which contains lots of stats and objective analysis, this is an aesthetic appraisal of the game’s archetypal and timeless aspects. I’ve been buried in it for the last couple…