Mint Condition

When award-winning journalist Dave Jamieson's parents sold his childhood home a few years ago, he was forced to clear out his old room. There among the dusty debris of his boyhood - Star wars toys, a Don Mattingly poster - he uncovered the motherlode, something he'd nearly forgotten: his baseball cards. Staring out from 1980s cardboard were the fresh faces of his boyhood heroes, among them Kirby Puckett, Ryne Sandberg, and a skinny Barry Bonds. Now was the time to cash in on his "investments." But when he tried the card shops, Jamieson discovered they were nearly all gone, closed forever. eBay was no help, either. Baseball cards were selling for next to nothing. Craigslist was even worse. What had happened? In Mint Condition, Jamieson's history of baseball cards, he finds the answer and much more. In the years after the Civil War, tobacco companies started slipping baseball cards into cigarette packs as collector's items, creating a massive advertising war. Before long, the cards were wagging the cigarettes, and a century-long infatuation had been born. In the 1930s, baseball cards helped gum and candy makers survive the Great Depression, and kept children - many of whom couldn't afford a ticket to a game - in touch with the great stars of the day like Babe Ruth and Jimmie Foxx. After World War II, Topps Chewing Gum Inc. built itself into an American icon, hooking a generation of baby boomers on bubble gum and baseball cards during the game's golden era. In the 1960s, royalties from cards helped to transform the Major League Baseball Players Association into one of the country's most powerful unions, dramatically altering the business of the game. And in the '80s and '90s, cards went through a spectacular bubble, becoming a billion-dollar-a-year industry with an estimated eighty-one billion cards produced a year at its peak, before all but disappearing. Mint Condition is a history of this cherished hobby, as well as a look into the current state, where cards are largely the rarefied preserve of fanatical adult collectors and shrewd businessmen. Jamieson's book is filled to the brim with colorful characters, from the destitute hermit whose legendary - and priceless - 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 the professional "graders" who rate cards and the "doctors" who secretly alter them to a larger-than-life memorabilia specialist whose auction house is under investigation by the FBI. - Publisher.