Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession

"When 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."
Dave Jamieson

The Great Baseball Card Bubble
"... Around the mid-1970s, a small cabal of serious baseball card collectors grew wise to the fact that their cards had become valuable. Cards had almost always had prices attached to them, even when prolific collector and cataloger Jefferson Burdick began sending out his Card Collectors Bulletin in the 1930s. But cards that had been worth a few cents were now worth a few bucks, and some of the rarer specimens, such as the T206 Honus Wagner, were commanding hundreds and occasionally thousands of dollars apiece. The number of trade shows sprouting up in the East and the Midwest testified to a growing market."
Slate

Napoleon LaJoie

"... But onto the book itself. Jamieson dug deeply into the rich history of baseball cards, and I learned a lot from this book. The first time baseball cards created a sensation among young boys was in the 1880's, when cigarette companies inserted cards into their packs of cigarettes. This had the dual effect of both promoting brand loyalty to collect more cards, and also of making these young boys eager smokers. Win-win for the cigarette manufacturers. According to Jamieson, the popularity of the baseball trading cards helped establish cigarettes as a tobacco product at a time when they were seen as hopelessly lower-class. (People with status smoked cigars or pipes.)"
Mark My Words

"It's a form of megalomania, of course, one famous card collector once said of his hobby—and, as Jamieson explains, there are plenty of people willing to cash in on collectors' obsessions; the secondary market for baseball cards may be as much as a half-billion dollars annually. It used to be even stronger: Jamieson got interested in the history of baseball cards when he rediscovered his own adolescent stash only to find that its value had plummeted in the mid-1990s. His loss is our gain as he tracks the evolution of the card from its first appearance in cigarette packs in the late 19th century through the introduction of bubble gum and up to the present. The historical narrative is livened by several interviews, including conversations with the two men who launched Topps (for decades the first name in cards) and a collector who's dealt in million-dollar cards. ... - Publishers Weekly"
amazon: Mint Condition