It hasn't taken long for Amelie Mancini to wrap her arms around baseball. After moving from her native France to New York in 2006, she became fascinated by the game, soaked up the nuances and history of the sport and became a devoted New York Mets.
Mancini is an artist and it's that talent that led her to create her own unique baseball cards earlier this year. They're nothing like you'll see at your local card shop. Left Field Cards is what you might expect from an artist whose only trading card license is an artistic one.
Using linocuts, she unveiled her first 'series' of the quirky cards with "Bizarre Injuries", a chronicle of ten different players who have suffered a little as the result of something other than a hard slide into third (see Nolan Ryan vs. Coyote). She made them postcard sized since some fans might prefer to use them that way.
She hand prints every card, one by one, on a very old hand press in the basement of the Greenpoint Reformed Church, blocks from her studio in Brooklyn. Because they're hand printed no two are exactly alike. The cards are printed on a high quality letterpress paper using rubber-based inks and are wrapped in silkscreened vellum. She even created a wrapper.
More series are on the way, according to this story which offers a little more insight into her work and the cards.