Dave Jamieson's first paid gig in journalism was working as a stringer for the Daily Record in his native New Jersey, where he covered church groundbreakings, kindergarten parades and charity casino night for senior citizens. After a brief stint as a magazine fact-checker, he left for Washington, D.C. and spent four years as a staff writer at the Washington City Paper, the capital's alternative weekly. Though he wrote mostly about goings-on at the D.C. courthouse, some of his favorites stories dealt with a sex-obsessed serial arsonist, jumbo-slice pizza, a late-night informercial pitchman, teenage burglars and a regional sausage of mysterious origins.

Now a freelance writer based in Chicago, he's written for the Washington Post, Slate, The New Republic, The Big Money, and the Huffington Post Investigative Fund. His first book, MINT CONDITION: HOW BASEBALL CARDS BECAME AN AMERICAN OBSESSION, was published in April 2010 by Atlantic Monthly Press. He has won the Livingston Award for Young Journalists and the Sidney Hillman Foundation's Sidney Award. He graduated from the University of Virginia with a B.A. in English in 2001.

Books by Dave Jamieson

Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession

by Dave Jamieson - Nonfiction, Sports

Picture cards had long been used for advertising, but after the Civil War, tobacco companies started slipping them into cigarette packs as collector’s items. Before long, the cards were wagging the cigarettes. 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 adult collectors.