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How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession
Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
April 2010
On Sale: April 1, 2010
320 pages
ISBN: 0802119395
EAN: 9780802119391
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
When award-winning journalist Dave Jamieson’s parents sold
his childhood home a few years ago, forcing him to clear out
his old room, he happily rediscovered a prized boyhood
possession: his baseball card collection. Now was the time
to cash in on his “investments,” but all the card shops had
closed, and eBay was no help, either. Cards were selling
there for next to nothing. What had happened? In Mint
Condition, Jamieson’s fascinating history of baseball
cards, he finds the answer, and much more. Picture cards had long been used to
advertise household products, but in the years after the
Civil War, tobacco companies started slipping them into
cigarette packs as collector’s items. Cards featuring famous
generals and Indian chiefs, flags of all nations, and comely
actresses all achieved success with boys, but none were as
popular as cards featuring the heroes of the new American
pastime. Before long, the cards were wagging the cigarettes,
and a century-long infatuation had been born. In the 1930s, cards helped gum and
candy makers survive the Great Depression. In the 1960s,
royalties from cards helped transform the baseball players
association into one of the country’s most powerful unions,
dramatically altering the game. In the ’80s and ’90s, cards
went through a spectacular bubble, becoming a
billion-dollar-a-year industry before all but disappearing,
surviving today as the rarified preserve of fanatical adult
collectors and shrewd businessmen. Mint Condition is brimming
with colorful characters, from a destitute hermit whose
legendary collection resides at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art, to Topps’s mad genius designer who created the
company’s most famous card sets, and from a larger-than-life
memorabilia specialist whose auction house is under
investigation by the FBI to the professional “graders” who
rate cards and the “doctors” who secretly alter them. This
is an original, captivating history about a tradition dear
to millions of Americans.
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