Students celebrate victory over Yale at Boston College’s Alumni Field in 1920. Photograph: Burns Library

Serious historians of Boston College athletics have had two serious books to turn to. The first is Athletics at Boston College, Volume I, by Nathaniel Hasenfus ’22, a 1943 volume long out of print and distinguished for its author’s heroic effort to preserve the play-by-play records of every football and ice hockey contest the Eagles had engaged in over the previous 60 or so years. (Hasenfus had designs on a Volume II, but never completed it; his notes are in the University archives.) And the second is the late Jack Falla’s ‘Till the Echoes Ring Again, a “pictorial history” published in 1982 that is relatively light on pictures but strong on prose and words, including 39 pages dense with agate-type statistical material.

Now they are joined by a third book deserving of attention: The Boston College Football Vault (Whitman, 2008), an oversized coffee-table affair, heavyweight class, that proffers a history of Eagles football along with some 250 illustrations—mostly photographs, but also editorial cartoons and newspaper clips. In addition, the book includes 70-plus facsimiles of programs, tickets, rosters, scorecards, letters, and song sheets that are tucked into pockets on the book’s pages. (The formula is one the publisher has used to produce some 30 similarly decorative volumes for other universities.)

In contrast with the all-due-diligence efforts of both Hasenfus and Falla, Vault is a captivating highlight reel, authored by Reid Oslin ’68, a University administrator who directed sports information from 1974 to 1997, and who in 2004 published Tales from the Boston College Sideline. (Full disclosure: I’ve known Oslin as a University colleague since 1978, and he’s occasionally written for this magazine.)

The facsimiles are fascinating, not only for their visual quaintness, but for the primary-source information that tumbles out when they’re unpacked and unfolded: the pre-numeralization Boston College telephone exchange (DEcatur-2); the words from mimeographed sheets of 1950s-era cheers (“War Eagles! War Eagles! War Eagles! Fight! Fight! Fight!”); and from an August 30, 1966, press release, the precise cause of death of Margo, the third and last of the University’s eagle mascots, who succumbed to aspergillosis—a fungus “peculiar to birds,” the release noted, possibly to reassure the many alumni who’d consorted with Margo at postgame parties in the old Alumni House.

The photographs are a greater revelation. Drawn from fresh research in the University archives as well as two large private collections to which Oslin had access, many of the images were unfamiliar to me; but even those that I knew—sometimes all too well—were treated with imagination by the book’s designer, through enlargements, collages, odd croppings, and spot colorization. It’s the pre-1950s photos that are particularly memorable, for the detail they surrender to the inquisitive eye (many were taken with large-format cameras) and for the cavalcade of hat styles, Boston College presidents who don’t look old enough to be doctoral students, plowed-up football fields, and players whose exertions and exhaustions are poignantly visible on their unmasked faces.

Oslin’s history itself offers a quick-moving account of personalities and games organized around eight “eras” that stretch from the Eagles’ first victory (October 20, 1893, over the woefully named St. John’s Literary Society) to the 11-win season that made Matthew Ryan the highest-salaried graduate of the Class of 2007.

It’s inevitable in a production such as this one that the words would seem to be carrying the harmony and not the melody, but Oslin’s counterpoint is worth attending to. He knows a lot more about Boston College football than he has room to say here—or than he’d ever say for public consumption—and that’s evident in the precision and sure-footedness of his narration. Sometimes he does advert to what has not previously been surfaced, as when he reports that in the wake of Dan Henning’s resignation following the 1996 gambling scandal that led to the suspension of 13 students, director of athletics Chet Gladchuk ’73 set out to hire another coach out of the NFL (Henning had been with the Detroit Lions) and was “overruled by senior university officials.” In any event, there is enough that can be divined from the photographs to satisfy imaginations longing for something new.

Three pictures seemed particularly illustrative of this. One captures the endearing ballet of 40 young men doing a chaotic snake dance on Alumni Field while dressed in funerary suits, topcoats, and hats, and holding their thick leather briefcases. The second shows the buttoned-down Tom Coughlin, coach from 1991 to 1993, looking wretched on a Tampa, Florida, stage to which he’d been summoned by some bowl official to study belly dancing with the professional practitioner who is wriggling beside Coughlin in the photo. And the third is a photo I’d never before seen, of Lou Mongomery ’41, the star “Negro” halfback who was forbidden from playing in the Sugar and Cotton bowl games in 1940 and 1941 by the terms of the Jim Crow contract that Boston College signed with Clemson and Tennessee.

A handsome man, with delicate wrists that look like they belong to a chess player, Montgomery’s seated in a heavy coat and looking away from the camera. His left hand holds what appears to be a rolled-up newspaper on his knee, while his right elbow rests on a nearby table, and his fist is tucked to his chin in the classic gesture of contemplation. About 20 years ago, as the 50th anniversary of those bowl games neared, I tried to contact Montgomery—who has since died—to see if I could send someone to interview him for this magazine. Through an intermediary, he replied with a crisp no. His distracted, pensive look in this photograph supplies the why that I never got.

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