Larry Canale

Author Larry Canale has been editor in chief of Antiques Roadshow Insider since Issue #1 in July 2001. The monthly newsletter is published by Belvoir Media Group of Norwalk, Conn., and licensed by the popular PBS TV series Antiques Roadshow, a 10-time Emmy Award nominee. Canale writes a regular column for the magazine Sports Collectors Digest, published by Krause/F+W Media, and in 2015 started a series on baseball's greatest photographers at The National Pastime Museum's website: http://www.thenationalpastimemuseum.com/article/charles-conlon-every-picture-tells-story

Prior to his work for Antiques Roadshow Insider, Canale served for six years (1993-2000) as editorial director at Tuff Stuff Publications and editor of its flagship, Tuff Stuff, a magazine for collectors of sports memorabilia. At the time, the magazine's parent company was Tuff Stuff Publications, owned by Landmark Communications and based in Richmond, Va. His work for TSP included the editorial direction of several other publications, including Gridiron (for football collectors); Collect! (entertainment cards and collectibles); RPM (NASCAR memorabiliia); and Beans! (Beanie Babies);

From 1984-1992, Canale worked in a similar capacity for Hancock, NH-based Wayne Green Enterprises. For WGE, he launched and edited CD Review magazine (originally titled Digital Audio) along with a host of related music and audio guides and special issues.

While working as a magazine editor, Canale also has authored and/or edited these books:

* Digital Audio's Compact Disc Guide, a titled published by Bantam Books in 1986, when the CD was revolutionizing the music industry (and long before iPods and music downloads would spark a new revolution).

* Mickey Mantle: The Yankee Years/The Classic Photography of Ozzie Sweet (Tuff Stuff Books). a spectacularly illustrated 224-page book that won a Casey Award nomination as one of the best baseball books of 1998. The book was among the first produced by a then-new imprint at TSP in Virginia.

• Tuff Stuff's Baseball Memorabilia Price Guide, published by Krause Books (2001).

* Ozzie Sweet: The Boys of Spring (Sport Media Group, 2005), a 240-page book presenting more than 300 classic baseball images made by Sweet at spring training in Florida and Arizona between 1947 and 2005. Subjects range from Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Ted Williams to Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Roberto Clemente, and from Johnny Bench, Pete Rose, and Reggie Jackson to Derek Jeter, Alex Rodriguez, Jim Thome, and C.C. Sabathia.

* Mickey Mantle: Memories & Memorabilia (Krause Books, 2011), a 224-page, well-illustrated tribute to "The Magnificent Yankee."

In the works: the first-ever biography of Ozzie Sweet, the widely acclaimed photgrapher. Titled "Ozzie Sweet: America's Cover Photographer," the book will feature illustrations of the 300 best Sweet magazine covers among his nearly 2,000 credits. While known especially for his sports portraits, Sweet has always considered himself, above all, a "magazine cover specialist." His creative, colorful, often Rockwellian "photographic illustrations" have graced the covers of hundreds of different titles, beginning with the Oct. 12, 1942 issue of Newsweek and, more recently, the Dec. 30, 2011 issue of Sports Collectors Digest. In the seven decades in between, magazines of all subjects, sizes, and circulation used Sweet photos as covers: Boys' Life, Collier's, Cosmopolitan, Family Circle, Field & Stream, Fur Fish & Game, Golf, Good Housekeeping, Parade, Popular Mechanics, Popular Photography, Popular Science, Saturday Evening Post, Sport, Sports Illustrated, Time, TV Guide, Womens' Circle, and hundreds of others.

"I love magazines, and I love photography," Canale says, "so getting the chance to work with Ozzie — whose portraits for Sport magazine I remember enjoying as a kid — has been a blessing. It's a pretty inspirational project, too. The sheer quantity of Ozzie's archive is just unbelievable, and the quality never wavered.

"Right at the top of my own career highlights," he adds, "is the series of five trips I took with Ozzie to Florida to photograph spring training — first in 1999 and then from 2003 through 2006. It was enlightening and exciting and also very moving to watch him return to the same ballfields where he photographed so many legends of baseball in the 1940s, '50s, and '60s. There's a whole chapter in our 'Boys of Spring' book devoted to those trips. The images in that chapter remind me of how touched Ozzie was when photographer after photographer — current 'sports shooters' for ESPN, Sports Illustrated, MLB — asked him for his autograph or to have their picture taken with him or to just shake his hand."

When Canale finishes Ozzie Sweet: America's Cover Photographer, he says, it will include a reflection of those spring training trips, but most of the book will focus on Ozzie's unparalleled career, describing the way he worked, the thought process that went into his covers, and the traits that made him such a highly regarded artist.

"Ozzie's positive nature and uplifting, optimistic attitude always show up in his photographs," Canale says. "Collectively, they provide a telling portrait of idealized American life in the second half of the 20th century."