Two Guys On The Road with Books

2010-09-09T22:55:00.002-04:00

I nearly bought both copies of this book because... well... the title pretty much covers it:

From the author of Valley of the Dolls, Once is Not Enough was one of those novels from the early seventies.

2010-06-01T23:47:00.004-04:00

Nifty score at the thrift store today-
the first seven volumes of the graphic novel Cerebus the Aardvark.

Lasting three-hundred issues, Cerebus was written and illustrated by one man, Dave Sim. Sim published it himself under the Aardvark-Vanaheim banner.

These books cover the first half of the series, through issue 162.
It was originally created as a anthropomorphic animal satire of Conan, but it evolved into something deeper, an exploration into philosophy and society.

It was groundbreaking in it's independence, content, and the release of the book in trade paperback, years before Marvel and DC were doing it. Fans of the series referred to the collected editions as "phone books" since they were bigger than most of the collected editions of the era.

Of course it's going on ebay.

2010-05-05T23:43:00.002-04:00

I'm going to be taking a break in the book blog til the estate sale is over.
We'll still be blogging over in the antiques blog, and I'll be blogging more regularly in my person blog over at www.clayhornik.com.

2010-05-05T01:23:00.000-04:00

LONG day today- first our weekly appointment in Richmond then seeing several customers at the estate sale house.

Tired.

Technically, I'm posting this Tuesday night, but according to the calendar, it's Wednesday, so I think it's the first time since August I've missed a date posting.

2010-05-03T23:19:00.002-04:00

Sometimes I wonder how stuff shows up in thrift stores.
Somethings make sense, like multiple copies of The Da Vinci Code show up after a while.
But sometimes, multiple copies of the same book show up at the same time.
Like thirty-three copies of The Holy Bible (NKJV).
One of the benefits of working at an independent bookstore was that neither of them really carried Bibles. This wasn't a political or religious statement- they carried the Penguin edition of The King James Bible as a work of English Literature, but for the most part there are just too many editions of the Bible to carry.
King James. New King James. New Revised Standard. New Internation Version.
Black leather cover. Red leather cover.
Red letter edition.
Thumb tabs.
Print sizes.
These were all things we had to take into account at the chain store when customers asked about Bibles. It was a headache because despite the insane variety of Bibles we had they were never the right ones.
Not to mention that they were one of our biggest areas for shrinkage.

Who'd steal a Bible?

2010-05-02T23:29:00.002-04:00

Lazy Sunday.
Aside from labeling envelopes for the estate sale.

Lots of googling names and addresses.
Bleary eyed, actually.

Better bookpost tomorrow.

2010-05-01T23:09:00.003-04:00

Yesterday in Chincoteague we hit two of my favorite bookspots on the Eastern Shore.
One was Bookhounds, a used bookstore that caters to both the collector- a first edition of The Westing Game and an advance readers copy of The Da Vinci Code were in the display case- and the casual reader.
The other was Psychotronic, a video/record/bookstore that celebrates the weird and the obscure.
I picked up a book on made for tv horror and sci-fi movies called Cyborgs, Santa Claus and Satan.
You can't help but love a title like that.

It only looks like a book...

2010-04-30T23:22:00.003-04:00

I was going through the picture files of things we've sold over the last few months and I noticed a few pieces that stood out.
Like this box:

And this lamp:Even this plant holder:

It's almost enough to make me want to buy them myself to use when I open a bookstore.
Except I know better than to do that.

2010-04-29T22:39:00.002-04:00

It's always sad to see multiple copies of a book on the shelves of a thrift store (unless it's The Da Vinci Code). I expect the majority of these were originally purchased in the media build up for the movie version of My Sister's Keeper.

2010-04-28T22:18:00.001-04:00

I picked this up, hoping it was worth something. Got back to the house and checked the value.
It was worth the smile on Perry's son's face when I gave it to him.

2010-04-27T20:57:00.003-04:00

We were in Richmond today and we'd stopped to look at some used books.
I'd wandered around in my standard "look at all the pretty books" mode when I found Perry looking at a book, Rhett Butler's People, a sequel to Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell.
His reaction: "You're kidding, right?".

I told him the Mitchell estate had a very good reason to authorize the book.
Money, suggested Perry.
Yes and no, I told him.
It's also a copyright issue. This is an AUTHORIZED sequal.
Gone With The Wind will enter public domain in the US in 2031, ninety five years after publication, but between 1999 and 2004 in Austrailia, where books enter PD fifty years after the death of the author, GWTW was up for grabs- it's back under copyright due to an extension of the copyright to seventy years after the author's death.

As soon as GWTW hits public domain here in the States you can be sure all mannner of un-authorized sequels, prequels, and what have you will be cropping up like mushrooms in a cowfield after a thunderstorm.

(You know what makes mushrooms grow, right?)

With the propagation of print on demand, anyone who's obsessively read GWTW a million times and has filled up notebooks and hard drives with their fan fiction will be able to publish at will.

There won't be a thing to stop them.

Scary, huh?

So, in order to curb that frenzy to a minimum, the Mitchell estate has answered the question of What Happened To Scarlett After "... tomorrow is another day"? with Alexandra Ripley's novel Scarlett , while Rhett Butler's People is GWTW from Butler's point of view, as well as filling in Butler's past.

There was a challanger to the copyright in Alice Randall's The Wind Done Gone, the novel told from the point of view of the slaves, which managed to stay in publication due to the publisher agreeing to label it a parody.

Personally, I'm waiting for the remake. It's just a matter of time. They should get Scarlett Johansson to play Scarlett, 'cause that'd look awesome on the poster.

2010-04-27T00:03:00.000-04:00

No post tonight.
We got busy doing envelopes for the estate sale that things got away from me.
Sorry.

2010-04-25T20:57:00.002-04:00

First off:
Two Thousand Hits!!
Thanks, y'all. You keep readin' and I'll keep writin'.

Now to books:

I picked these two books up this weekend. I'd seen listings for them online, but hadn't pursued them. Lucky for me, they were at a used bookstore where I had a credit.
Now, I'm glad I didn't actually pay money for them.
The selling point for both of them was the fact that the heirs to the estates of Bela Lugosi, Bela Lugosi Jr, and Boris Karloff, Sara Karloff, had written the introductions to them.
At least with the Dracula book that was the best part. The story echoes the movie, faintly, with similar updated situations in Atlanta, but then goes in its own, unique direction involving AIDS and Bosnia.
I tried to ignore little things like Robert E Lee's family owning a plantation in Georgia (he's from Virginia) and a shipwreck on the coast (Atlanta is landlocked).
I'm truly frightened to read the Frankenstein book.
I have too much respect for the James Whale classics- Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein- to see it done the same injustice as Dracula.

Love the covers though.

2010-04-24T22:50:00.002-04:00

You know, sports figures and movie stars have sex scandals.
What does the publishing industry have?
Authors falsifying data. That's the big industry scandal.
Right now, the author of A Band of Brothers, the late Stephen Ambrose, is getting attention in the New Yorker for some liberties he's taken with the facts in his biography of Eisenhower.

Ooooooh sexy.

I know, right? Why can't Amy Tan and Stephen King leave their spouses to be with each other in Paris? That would certainly throw The New Yorker AND People for a loop.

2010-04-23T23:28:00.000-04:00

Ran across a couple of Gor books today.
I can add them to the one I've got all ready and turn them into a lot on ebay.

Such is my exciting life.

2010-04-22T19:14:00.002-04:00

Well, I found something today.
It was a first edition of a paperback original and the fifth book by the author- third under his own name, his first two books were released under a pseudonym- second book from that publisher.
It's a horror novel, from an author who's acquired quite a following lately, and was reprinted back in '03 by a small press.

I passed on it.

I don't know why- when I saw it, I went "eeeeeee!" and even after I checked the print history (that little line of numbers from 1 to 10 on the copyright page that indicate print run) and saw it was a first printing, I put it back.

Second guessed myself.

I need to stop doing that.

It was somewhere that we hit regularly and if it's still there, I'll pick it up.
If so, I'll do an update post.

2010-04-21T23:15:00.002-04:00

Slow day today, having a hard time finding anything.
And by anything I mean anything worth selling at a price that'd start at $9.99 - anything less is a waste of time.

I did find a Gor novel- Captive of Gor, which for all intents and purposes should be called "Naughty Liberated Woman Kidnapped to Gor to Learn Her Place as Taught by Big Brutal Men."

Seriously. Brain Bleach material. But people want 'em. If they want 'em, I'll sell 'em.

It's the only Gor I've got in stock right now, so I'll sit on it til I've gotten a couple of others- books like that work best sold in a lot of three or four.

2010-04-20T23:46:00.005-04:00

I'm trying to write a book. My method is a little scattershot- write, research, write, research.
Part of what it involves the old movies and life in the 1970s.
That's a big chunk of what I'm having to wrap my head around.
Like the availability of movies.
I've got no less than three editions of this movie- VHS, Legacy DVD edition (all the Universal Dracula films), and 75th anniversary edition. I've even seen it on the big screen with Philip Glass and company playing accompaniment for Glass's new score (it didn't originally have a score)- you can play the dvd with or without it.
But pre VCR, fans were lucky to catch it on television on Shock Theatre in syndication or as a special showing at Halloween at an enterprising movie theater... OR...
8mm film abbreviated editions.
Here Castle Films, the distributor of these 8mm gems, has Dracula truncated to nine minutes.

It just boggles my mind, but I guess you'd take what you could back then.
Here's the Castle Film, in its entirety.

Billy Baldwin decorates... yes he does.

2010-04-19T22:47:00.005-04:00

On the drive back from Richmond today, I got Perry to read to me from Billy Baldwin decorates, design ideas from the classic American designer Billy Baldwin.
I'm not familiar with his work and considering the design shows I've been watching on tv, it's good to see where a lot of it comes from. We encounter the book- now out of print- occasionally.
The copy we've got lacks a dust jacket and has what appears to be a coffee stain on the cover.
The pictures inside and text are still workable though.
What's crazy is Baldwin writing about designing Cole Porter's apartment at the Waldorf Astoria.
The Cole Porter at The Waldorf Astoria.
It's an echo of a more stylish era, of martinis and cigarettes and the society page.
Now, we've got Cribs.
Our loss.

Songcatcher Saved the Day

2010-04-18T21:20:00.006-04:00

One of my standby movies to watch like some people eat comfort food is the 1990 Maggie Greenwald film Songcatcher starring Janet McTeer, Jane Adams, Aidan Quinn, and Emmy Rossum among others in a Sundance Film Festival winning ensemble cast that includes several well known folk musicians in cameo performances-Iris Dement for example.

I saw this in theaters when it first came out, and was immediately enchanted with the western North Carolina mountain setting, and the incorporation of music into the story of a turn of the century musicologist who "discovers" English folk ballads being sung by the mountain people in relatively unchanged forms from hundreds of years ago while visiting her sister who runs a rural mountain school.

Even with some unnecessary modern introductions regarding morality, this film still resonates with me about finding unexpected beauty if we keep our eyes (and ears in this case) open for it.

I hadn't watched for a while, but since I was mostly in bed yesterday recovering from food poisoning* it seemed like a good movie to drag out.

I think I like it even more now, and yeah, it helped me feel better. Watch it if you get the chance.

*(never eat auction hot dogs-just saying!)

2010-04-17T23:32:00.002-04:00

Off the road today.
It's been an odd sort of day- Perry's got food poisoning, so I've kept busy cleaning the apartment- which we've been too busy for, so it works out.

Let's just say we're not eating anything at an auction unless it's factory sealed.

2010-04-16T23:51:00.000-04:00

We just spent four hours in the middle of elsewhere at an auction.
Good auction food.
Long drive out- DC Beltway style gridlock in Tidewater = discussion of "you think we should go?".
We're glad we went.
Long drive back- no streetlights makes elsewhere seem even more remote.

Tired.

So tired I'm crossposting this from the antiqueblog.

2010-04-15T22:39:00.004-04:00

For some reason I'm obsessed with Iceland.
It's always a happy day when I find about about it, happier still if it's a picture book.
Like the one I found today- Reykjavik: A Panorama In Four Seasons.
Lots and lots of beautiful pictures from Reykjavik in 1973, so there's this crazy retrovibe as well as the awesome of another country.

Always a treat.

2010-04-14T22:05:00.002-04:00

I've not been buying many books lately- we're into a busybusybusy state with the estate sale next month, so buying and listing hasn't been as high a priority.

The woman whose estate we're selling was a book person, however- more non-fiction than fiction, so we'll be looking at those in the estate blog once I can get access to them.

That's it for tonight. I'm feeling braindead.

2010-04-13T21:12:00.002-04:00

Things I don't miss about the bookstore:
Once, a woman and her husband came into the store and said they were looking for a new book by Stephen King. I showed them his latest in hardcover.
Not that one she said.
What's the title? I asked.
Duddits.
I showed her the list of titles in the book- no Duddits.
I asked a co-worker if he knew about the title.
He told me there was a character named Duddits in Dreamcather.
I asked the woman where she saw the book.
Someone was reading it in an airport.
Which airport?
It was one in Germany.
I told the woman what she'd seen was the German edition of Dreamcatcher.
She chose not to believe me and left the store thinking I was an idiot.

2010-04-12T23:43:00.002-04:00

Here's another Stratemeyer Syndicate series- Rick Brant. He's a science adventurer, his father is an engineer and "a Fellow of the American Institute of Atomic Scientists."
It's all about SCIENCE!! I have to keep reminding myself that it was written in 1947, so... it's um... dated. Rick creates a means to view who's at the doorbell from the second floor in the first book. It involves a series of mirrors, much like a periscope.

As opposed to, well, I don't know... a camera or something.

Rick's less Tom Swift Jr, and more Thomas Edison Jr- the science works, sort of, without the usual suspension of disbelief.
--
Reader Caty informed me that I was incorrect regarding Ken Holt as a Stratemeyer Syndicate book. As the Ken Holt books are from the same publisher as The Hardy Boys and Tom Swift and Rick Brant, the same style of packaging and written in the same manner, I just figured it was.

That's the cool thing about the internet- always an opportunity to learn something new.

2010-04-11T23:20:00.003-04:00

Yesterday I mentioned the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the people who brought the world The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.
Until I started looking into the Brett King books, I didn't realize just how huge they were.
Well over a hundred different series with many series having as many as thirty books, many of these adventures have become forgotten next to those of The Hardy Boys, who in turn are in danger of being eclipsed by characters such as Percy Jackson and Harry Potter.
One of the forgotten Ken Holt.
Ken and his friend Sandy have a tendency to find adventure and mystery in their travels, plot justified by the fact that Ken's father is a journalist and Sandy's father is a newspaper publisher.

The series adheres to a Syndicate formula: chose a profession for the father of the main character, then allow the main character to follow in his footsteps (Nancy Drew's father was a lawyer, the Hardy Boys' father was a police officer) and that leads to adventure.

Looking at the list of series, it's obvious the formula worked.

2010-04-11T00:45:00.000-04:00

In the Antique blog, I wrote about Western influenced stuff, cowboy plates and coffee cups.
The Western was never a genre I could get into until fairly recently.
I guess seeing The Searchers- John Wayne's epic- on the big screen made me realize the scope of the genre and I could see it beyond the stereotypes.

Then I found several of Fran Striker's Lone Ranger novels at a bookstore and gave them a marathon read. Of course they were good- they were The Lone Ranger. Something like that, if you think about it is little more than standard Pulp fiction, the stuff of The Shadow or Doc Savage, just transplanted to a more exotic local- the Old West.

Lately, I've been intreagued by the New West as seen in the Brett King mysteries. From the late fifties, Brett King was a publishing contemporary of Tom Swift Jr and the Hardy Boys from the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Brett and his friends solve mysteries and have adventures on Rim Rock Ranch with airplanes and motor cycles as well as horses.Ok, maybe it is a kids' book.
I can only read Ayn Rand and Nietzsche but so much before I need a break.
These things are fun and short- a great way to just escape after a hard day.

2010-04-09T22:52:00.000-04:00

No post tonight- crazy busy.
Better post tomorrow.

2010-04-08T22:00:00.003-04:00

If you're a certain age, these books will seem familiar to you- me, I remember my mother and my grandmother reading them back in the mid-seventies. John Jakes wrote The Kent Family Chronicles intending it to go from the Colonial Era to 1976. That idea just amazed me when my grandmother was reading it- apparently he didn't get past the 1890s.
I saw this set of them today, in hardcover bookclub editions. They made a great photo op, but I passed on it. These things had multiple printings in standard hardcover, let alone in bookclub editions and paperback... they're kind of common.
Despite Jakes' historical books- these and the North and South trilogy and others- I still think of him first as the guy doing the Robert E. Howard-style books in the Brak the Barbarian series.

2010-04-07T23:06:00.002-04:00

I'm so glad I'm out of the retail book business right now.
JK Rowling was at the Easter Egg roll at the White House and here's what she said

-... she doesn't plan to write any offshoots of the Potter series, she didn't rule it out "maybe 10 years from now," depending on how she feels.

Yeah. I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the chain-stores start their countdowns.
Or at least customers will start asking about it.

Really. When book 6 came out in hardcover, people came in the next week asking when the paper back would be out, when book 7 would be out.

I think of this as not as much dodging a bullet, but dodging a cannon ball.

2010-04-06T21:24:00.003-04:00

At an antique mall in Richmond Virginia today, I saw a book in a case that took me back quite a bit: The Blackman's Guide to Understanding the Blackwoman by Sharazad Ali.

Ms Ali's views of gender relations were... different than most of the relationship books from 1990.

''Her unbridled tongue is the main reason she cannot get along with the Blackman ... She often needs a reminder. This does not mean that she needs, or wants, to be battered or beaten to a bloody pulp. However, if she ignores the authority and superiority of the Blackman, there is a penalty. When she crosses this line and becomes viciously insulting it is time for the Blackman to soundly slap her in the mouth.''

Yeah.
Seriously.
What was... well, funny isn't the best word... but ironic about the whole thing was that women had heard about the title of the book and were sending their boyfriends into the store to pick up a copy without knowing about the content. But if someone came in with her boyfriend, we'd let her see that part before totalling the sale. There weren't too many books I was happy not to sell but this was one of them.

And it wasn't censorship- we'd give the ladies the data they needed to make an informed decision. If they still wanted to buy it, we'd gladly take their money.

2010-04-05T23:51:00.000-04:00

Sold even more books on ebay tonight, more packing.
We need to get a Price Club membership just to help cover the cost of the mailers.

2010-04-04T20:34:00.002-04:00

Yesterday we had a space at the Portsmouth Flea Market.
Half our space was devoted to antiques and the other half was devoted to books- cookbooks to be exact. Perry went through part of his collection and culled out his duplicates and others he'd lost interest in.
Seriously. He's got a huge cookbook collection, now only fractionally smaller.
The best part of selling them: the look on people's faces when they find THAT cookbook.

2010-04-03T21:27:00.002-04:00

It's funny, I've written about books that I've purchased "to sell" that I've intended on keeping.
Today, I bought a book I intended to sell, The History of the Future, but Perry thinks it's one of the most fascinating books I've picked up and he won't let me sell it.

It's a look at Yesterday's Tomorrows as seen in pop culture from the early twentith century through to mid century. As a fan of both Mid-Century Modern and Raygun Gothic it's a visual treat, like architectural SciFi p0rn.
And yes, I checked- it wouldn't make enough to sell it online. Guess we'll keep it.

2010-04-02T23:22:00.002-04:00

No real post tonight- we're going to be selling at the Portsmouth Flea Market tomorrow-
prepping, packing, and crashing early.

If you're in the Tidewater VA area and get a chance, stop in and say hello- we'll be there til 2pm.

2010-04-01T23:52:00.003-04:00

Well, the Stephen King / My Pretty Pony auction ended tonight, it went for $86 dollars, the winner lives in Austrailia. There's something conceptually odd chatting with someone online who's living where it's tomorrow.

Today I listed a portfolio of covers from The Shadow comics from the late eighties. Part of me wanted to keep them, because they're a The Shadow thing. But I'm not too enamored of the artist- Bill Sienkiewicz. He's got a freneticness that Jim Steranko- the cover artist of the paperbacks I collect- lacks. Steranko does energy and power, but in a more... subdued manner.

I'm sure there's some pulp fan who'd love to frame this for his library.

2010-03-31T23:34:00.002-04:00

Ugh. Tired.
Perry (mostly Perry tonight) and I have been listing on ebay like rabid ferrets.
That's after a day of prepping for the fleamarket this weekend.

So my brain is zombietastic.
Better blog tomorrow.

2010-03-30T21:56:00.002-04:00

I swear, we find the craziest stuff at estate sales.
This is from the defunct restaurant chain Sambos from 1977. Designed to keep the kiddies busy with coloring pages and puzzles, this one some how never got used.

This was, of course, before the chain got into trouble for it's rather evocative name. Sam Battistone and Newell Bohnett were the company's founders and used a merger of their names for the name of the restaurants, having nothing to do with the controversial children's book Little Black Sambo.

I've put this on ebay because there're collectors for nearly every company under the sun, so I'm sure there's a Sambo's collector out there somewhere who could use this.

(By the way, despite the controversy that surrounds it- no matter what you've heard- the book Little Black Sambo is still in print, including the original illustrations. It's so very still in print, in fact, that there's a Kindle edition available as well.
I've sold many copies of Little Black Sambo in the book stores I've worked in over the years and it never ceases to amaze me the surprise people have when they find it on the shelves. Occasionally, there's some grumbling about a banner on the cover - "The Only Authorized American Edition."
"Authorized? By who?" I'm asked.
"By the author's estate," I tell them, an answer both truthful and removed from the realm of controversy.)

2010-03-29T22:27:00.004-04:00

A couple of years ago, a friend turned me onto a radio show from the CBC, Nightfall, a weekly show of scary stories. It was reminiscent of the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre, but with a more contemporary feel.

Of all the episodes I heard, the one that stayed with me the most was Ringing The Changes, based on a short story by Robert Aickman (listen here if you get a chance), about a newlywed couple who've accidentally taken their honeymoon in a town where the dead have come back to life.

I'd keep my eyes open looking for some Aickman in thrift shops, flea markets and used bookstores, but no luck... until yesterday.
It's a hardcover collection of his short stories- including Ringing The Changes- with a cover by Edward Gorey. Gorey's best known for... oh, so many things including his set for a Broadway production of Dracula and the opening credits for PBS's Mystery!.

So: a terrific ghost story with a Gorey cover. Goth as a coffin and making me want to light up a clove cigarette.

Yeah, it's going on eBay.

2010-03-28T23:59:00.001-04:00

Drat.
I got caught up in listing and packing that I didn't get a post up here tonight.
Tomorrow's will be awesome, I promise.

2010-03-27T20:16:00.002-04:00

I picked up some vintage coloring books at an estate sale today- it's been a crazy day so I'll be putting up pictures tomorrow.

Time to unwind.

2010-03-26T23:34:00.003-04:00

I have a lot of books.
Some I haven't even read yet. Nor will I ever.
Not because the book isn't that good, it's just the book in question was bought as an investment.
Stephen King's My Pretty Pony.

It's a short story that later got reprinted in Nightmares and Dreamscapes. This is a "trade" edition, it's a oversized slipcase book from Knopf (Random House) with photographs by Barbara Kruger. It had a limited print run, but not as limited as the edition published by the Whitney Museum- that had stainless steel covers and a digital clock embedded on it.
Part of the collectibility is the fact that it's still sealed in its original shrinkwrap.

I just put it up on eBay yesterday, after seeing that it has gone for nearly a hundred dollars recently.

There are several listed right now, many in excess of five hundred dollars. I started mine at $24.99, as objects like this find their own value during the bidding- the one that sold recently for $92 started at $25.

It's easy enough to say "but it's WORTH a bajillion dollars!".
Doesn't mean anything unless it actually SELLS for a bajillion dollars.
This book isn't selling for a bajillion, but it'll probably sell for close to ninety.

We'll see.

2010-03-25T21:25:00.003-04:00

I really don't need anymore books.
hahahahahahahaha!
But I can never say no to a twenty-five cent hardback of a book I've had my eye on:
When I took the picture, Perry asked me if I was going to put it on eBay. I told him no, I was going to brag.

It includes the poem "Instructions" that I mentioned last month, as well as Gaiman's examination of the conclusion of CS Lewis's Narnia books in "The Problem of Susan."

2010-03-24T23:32:00.002-04:00

We picked up this little thing the other day- The Monster Book of Monsters. It's from the Harry Potter movies.

It's furry and plush and if you look at it sideways, pages out, it has a face.
Pull its tongue and it growls.
See the teeth? Scary!

This little monster is going on eBay- Amazon is out of stock and, for some reason, there aren't any on eBay.

I picked it up to show to Perry, just for giggles, and he suggested I purchase it.

I'd thought about it but wasn't sure; he's teaching me I need to trust my gut instinct when I see something. I think I'm getting better at it.

2010-03-23T23:31:00.003-04:00

Last month, I mentioned the boom and bust in the comics industry I called the implosion, citing Valiant Comics as one of the victims.
Today, we saw this on our travels:

Comic books. Ninety-nine cents each.
All of them Vailiant. In fact, it looks like a complete set of the publisher's books.
I checked eBay. One series, Doctor Solar, recently sold as a complete set for $64.95, for sixty issues.
As cool as it might seem to sell these on eBay, I'll be passing since crunching the numbers shows that it doesn't make for all that great profit.

2010-03-22T23:55:00.000-04:00

Sometimes I lie to myself when it comes to buying books.
I'll be at a flea market, yard sale or thrift store and I'll see a book, say... "Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner" like I found today.
I'll buy it, because there's a chance I might be able to sell it.
Oh, look- it goes for $2.69 on Amazon. Not worth trying to sell on eBay, guess I'll keep it.

I knew when I saw it that it wouldn't go for much
.
First it was a book from Harper Collins, a major publishing company that usually has pretty large print runs. Second, it was a tie-in for a significant cult movie- Blade Runner.
So I should have knew better.
I did.
Though, this way I can keep it.

Not a great business plan, of course.
But it looks great next to my Blade Runner dvds, Blade Runner computer game, and my Library of America edition of Philip K Dick's Sixties novels, including "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?".

Now I need to get the Blade Runner umbrella from ThinkGeek.com:

2010-03-21T21:10:00.002-04:00

When I was a kid, I had several Fisher Price sets (house, farm, garage) but for some reason, I never got the "A" Frame. I never forgot the A-Frame, and it's fascinated me for the last few decades or so. We see them occasionally on our travels, but shelf space being what it is, I skip them. The imagery keeps me happy.
That, and this book- A-Frame by Chad Randl. It's some sweet retro architectural porn.

It examines the history of the style with lots of pictures, as well as putting it in a cultural context.

It's not a book we'll sell, just because it's so much fun to leaf through.

2010-03-20T23:49:00.002-04:00

One of the items at the auction last night that I saw was an e-book reader from Franklin Covey.
Upon closer examination, I saw the battery contacts were corroded so it wasn't worth buying.

But today I've been looking at ebook readers on Amazon and eBay.
I'm not quite to the point where I'm going to drink the Kindle kool-aid, but something like the Jetbook or the ebookman from Franklin Covey.

I like them for their size- the jetbook looks about the size of a hardback while the ebookman is palm sized.

I do have an old laptop I've considered repurposing but the battery life isn't enough for the road- plus I do carry a full laptop with me already.

2010-03-19T23:44:00.003-04:00

Tired.
Just got in.
We hit an auction tonight and filled the car.
Pictures and commentary later.

I was disappointed they didn't have "auction" food- just pizzas that looked like they were from Dominos or Pizza Hut stacked high in cardboard boxes.

Now, time to relax.

PS: Here's how tired I am: I wrote this post for the antique blog and didn't realize I'd posted it here.

2010-03-18T22:11:00.002-04:00

It's funny... I haven't been to Busch Gardens in years, yet right after blogging about it, I see this on the interstate:
I'd swear on a stack of Bibles that those are indeed Busch Gardens' skyride gondolas.
Maybe if I'm lucky I can find time this summer to get out there to confirm it.

2010-03-17T21:37:00.002-04:00

When going through the bookshelves at the thrift stores, it's easy for me to see patterns in the donations- you can see which books came from the same donors. Like these two:
There's no doubt in my mind these books came from the same home.
Lost Souls by Poppy Brite, is an old favorite of mine- this copy is a book club edition but it was originally offered in hard cover; I actually had an Advance Reading Copy that I loved to bits not unlike a literary Velveteen Rabbit. It was also one of the books in the Abyss line, in fact it's stayed in print since original publication while many of it's contemporaries have faded into obscurity, including a new edition that's coming out in the UK in May with a companion novel, Drawing Blood. Brite has since moved from the horror genre to writing about a pair of New Orleans friends and their restaurant, Liquor.
Blackwater by Michael McDowell was a serial novel published in six parts, inspiring Stephen King to write The Green Mile. It's a Faulknerian family saga meets HP Lovecraft, from the man who would later create Beetlejuice. The above book is a book club edition omnibus, combining parts four, five and six in a single volume, volume two of two. I keep going back to the book section where I found it, looking for volume one. (I used to have both volumes but I gave them to a friend who'd actually introduced me to the books but had lost hers.) I'm going to put this on ebay and try to get the individual books one at a time.

The things that make me certain they're from the same home is first the genre, Southern tinted horor, then the fact that they're both book club editions. Next is their proximity to each other on the shelf, within three or four books of each other, meaning they got shelved at the same time.

When I see things like that, I always wonder who donated them, what sort of person he is.
When they're books that I've read and loved, I think he's probably someone kind of like me...

2010-03-16T23:59:00.004-04:00

Well, it's nearly midnight and I'm still at work.
We had an ebay auction end a little while ago and I'm packing something so it'll go out in the post first thing in the morning.

Yes. Midnight and working.
Such is the life of being self employed.

It's still new to me.
It's been six months and I'm still getting used to things- setting my own schedule and most importantly learning to think outside of the 9 to 5 mind set.

On the upside, in little more than two hours worth of effort, I made nearly a third of a week's paycheck.

Works for me.

2010-03-15T22:25:00.002-04:00

Listing on ebay tonight, using all my brain on that.
Will have a more substantial post tomorrow night.
Thanks.

2010-03-14T21:10:00.004-04:00

It's funny, I've got two similar auctions going on right now and they've both got an audience.
The first one ends tomorrow night and is for eight books in the Alfred Hitchcock and The Three Investigators series.

Actually, only six of them are from the Alfred Hitchcock series. After he died, they lost the right to the character and replaced him with Hector Sebastian, a Hitchcock-like director to mentor the Three Investigators.

The top two books have a foil- like cover, three of the books are Scholastic editions; in the second picture the top left cover is what I call one of the psychedelic covers, the top right one is a hardcover Weekly Reader edition.

As I write this at 10:30 Sunday night, it has eight bids- three bidders- and is up to $16 dollars from a starting price of $10.99 with seven people watching the auction. I think I may have underestimated the desirability of something in the lot. I made the lot as something from left overs- note the different cover styles in that lot verses the uniformity of design in the second lot, ending Tuesday.

These are the covers that came after the pyschedelic era, the more realistic style being a reaction to the earlier style.

Note the Alfred Hitchcock silhouette in the upper right of the covers. After the series changed, the logo morphed into a key hole design- visible in the cover of Scar Faced Beggar in the first lot.

There's one bid on this second lot, and the bidder bid on the first lot as well.
At this writing, she's not the top bidder, but nothings ever a sure thing in these auctions.
Heck, maybe the winning bidder hasn't even bid yet.
With as many watchers these auctions have, I won't be surprised if the winner swoops in at the last second.

We'll see.

2010-03-13T21:22:00.002-05:00

Now, Perry's the cookbook guy usually, but I've got a strange affinity for stuff from theme parks and roadside attractions.
When we found this, it brought back memories of childhood visits to Busch Gardens. I loved the skyrides and the train.
Not one for rollercoasters, I liked the "travel".
The "Rhine River Cruise" was kind of cool, but when I was in elementary school, my family was in a commercial for Busch Gardens where we took the cruise over and over and over again. The novelty of that ride kind of faded.

I just found out that Busch Gardens no longer has the Anheuser-Busch Clydesdales! No!
I loved the Clydesdales!
In memory of those grand horses, I give you this:

With that, I promise at least a week without using youtube in the blog..

2010-03-12T23:03:00.002-05:00

It's not that I haven't been buying books for eBay recently, it's just that I've not had anything too too awesome to post about.

Til today.

I've written before about the Abyss line of books that I collect.

Today I found seven books in the series at a thrift store, probably all from the same person. This brings my collection to twenty-seven books out of forty-nine.

I'll read them eventually.
In the meantime, I'll be happy with them on my shelf.

2010-03-11T23:57:00.002-05:00

We picked up a copy of The Supremes Sing Rogers & Hart yesterday. I love the Supremes, and I enjoy standards like Rodgers & Hart's songs so it's a treat. Still sealed.
I decided to order the mp3 edition so I wouldn't break the seal and I'm impressed- they do the classics, like My Funny Valentine, justice.
I wiki'd it when we got home and it turns out to be the last album they made before they were known as "Diana Ross & The Supremes" and the last album where Florence Ballard was a member.

Here's them singing a medly of Rodgers & Hart songs (Lover/With A Song In My Heart/My Romance), two of which, Lover and My Romance, are on the album.

2010-03-10T22:27:00.002-05:00

Today was slow finding stuff.
Aside from an LP I picked up (I'll write about it tomorrow) I found this bad boy:

It's an ex-library copy of a hardcover reprint of two of the Shadow pulps, Crime Over Casco and The Mother Goose Murders. It was reprinted in 1979, toward the end of the first revival of interest in The Shadow. (The revival started in the late sixties/early seventies with paperback reprints, I've written about them here.)
I was hoping it would be a score but when I got home, I looked it up on Amazon- copies are going low, starting at $1.99. Sooooo, guess I'm going to keep it.

2010-03-09T23:29:00.005-05:00

Blame William Gibson.
I got nothing done tonight because I was internet window shopping... nothing I should spend money on right now, but fun to look at.
But I'm not satisfied to just browse Amazon or Overstock. No, of course not.
I spent the first part of my browsing looking at pictures and trying to guesstimate where I was clicking on the e-commerce site Rakuten. I got there after searching for Buzz Ricksons. Ricksons is a Tokyo bases clothing company that does recreations of American military and vintage clothing.

I became aware of them because of Gibson's Pattern Recognition, where the main character's outfit is described:
... a fresh Fruit T-shirt, her black Buzz Rickson's MA-1, anonymous black skirt from a Tulsa thrift, the black leggings she'd worn for Pilates, black Harajuku schoolgirl shoes. Her purse-analog is an envelope of black East German laminate, purchased on eBay - if not actual Stasi-issue then well in the ballpark.

Oddly, the black jacket wasn't produced by Rickson's until after Gibson's novel.

I've got a black MA-1 but it's not a $485 reproduction import, it's an $80 military surplus; makes me just as happy.

I'm liking these Rickson's Khakis, only 10,290 yen (US$114).

Not anytime soon. But soon enough.

Because black leather catsuits never go out of style...

2010-03-08T23:33:00.002-05:00

As dvd's take their place on collectors' shelves across the country, they boot out the videophile's old friend the VHS tape.
It's not uncommon to see several boxed sets showing up at thrift stores at once, usually from the same donor.
Today, it was The Avengers, the classic British spy show, made famous here in the States by Diana Rigg as Emma Peel, companion in adventure to John Steed, played by Patrick Macnee.

It was all about the style in these adventures. Wit, charm, elegance, with some of the most bizarre enemies outside of sixties era Batman

In a curious, for the era, point of reversal, Rigg was presented as the action character- guns and martial arts. She was the second sidekick, the first being played by Honor Blackman, who left the series to play Pussy Galore in Goldfinger (Blackman's epidsodes weren't broadcast in the States until the late eighties/early nineties on A&E).

Rigg eventually left the show as well, to do a Bond film- On Her Majesty's Secret Service. In fact, Rigg's character played the only woman to get James Bond to the alter. If you're familiar with the Bond movies, two guesses how it ended.

2010-03-07T23:23:00.002-05:00

And after yesterday's musical interlude...
I'm packing boxes to go out tomorrow.
Such is the glamorous life of an internet book guy.

... that's it. Today has been mostly a vegitative state with brief interludes of writing.

Not blogging mind you but real writing. Plot, characters, the whole nine yards.
I'm the world's slowest Nanowrimo participant.

Divas...

2010-03-06T23:52:00.001-05:00

The term "diva" gets thrown about lately, usually in reference to annoying women with over inflated egos, with nothing to back it up.
But every so often, you get to see what Divas used to be about.
Sure they were arrogant, but they had a reason to be.
Like a soprano that could crack a wine glass with her voice.
Anita Rywalska-Sosnowska and Renata Drozd (the one with the tattoo)are classic old skool Divas in this cover of Là ci darem la mano from Don Giovanni by Poland's Filharmonia Dowcipu.

I have no idea where this post came from tonight. Need mor sleep.

2010-03-05T23:28:00.002-05:00

I'm totally... kerfluffled after today. Long day.
Big post over in the antique blog about getting this desk today:

It's designed by Norman Bel Geddes, who wrote two books on design: Magic Motorways and Horizons. They're both out of print but available here on the internet archive.

2010-03-04T22:13:00.005-05:00

We went to an auction yesterday and Perry picked up a couple of box lots.
One had wire cake stands in it:
The other lot was a box of books:
Cookbooks, as it turns out. Cake, cupcake and muffin cookbooks.
Because we don't have enough cookbooks.*
We've given it a lot of thought- because that's what we do while we're on the road- and speculated about the auction.
One of the books in the lot was How to Create a Financially Successful Bakery.
One of the box lots we didn't bid on consisted of muffin pans.
We think someone wanted to open a bakery, bought stuff, then the plan fell through so they put the stuff up for auction to recoup some costs.

That's our theory anyway.

(Odd bit: inside the cover of The Cake Bible was Prevention Magazine's 50 Delicious Recipes for Weight Loss Success. Not making any judgements, just... observing.)

*He does have a few, but y'know, it's Cupcakes. Can't say no to that.

2010-03-03T22:46:00.002-05:00

Brain dead tonight.
Better blog post tomorrow night.
In the meantime- here's some music.
Michael Feinstein was the literary executor of Ira Gershwin and he's the George Gershwin guy.
Cheyenne Jackson was in the musical Xanadu and is on 30 Rock.

Me And My Shadow - Cheyenne Ja...

Enjoy.

2010-03-02T23:36:00.004-05:00

We hit thrift stores as well as antique malls and flea markets in our journeys.
That's where I find a lot of my book bargains.
But lately, donations have been slow.

Perry says this is the emptiest the shelves have been in years. I know it's the worst I've seen.
It's a sign of the economy- people are buying less so they're not getting rid of the old stuff as quickly.

Waitin' for the turn around to come along...

2010-03-01T23:01:00.004-05:00

I periodically encounter things that make me ask:
"What were they thinking?".
Like this ad.

Taken from a 1970 issue of Famous Monsters of Filmland that I picked up this weekend.

The idea rang a bell, and after a little searching, I found an article from Comic Book Resources.

Pet monkeys.

Yeah. I'd do it.

2010-02-28T19:48:00.002-05:00

Watching the closing ceremonies of the Olympics in Vancouver and it occurred to me that I should see what Douglas Coupland thinks of the whole thing.

Coupland is a Vancouver based writer who wrote the novel Generation X, which is where the nickname for the post-babyboomers came from. Since then he's written two books on Canadiana, Souvenir of Canada I and II, as well as nearly a dozen novels.

Both Blackbook Magazine and the New York Times thought to get his views.
Of course, since he's just come out with a new novel, Generation A, it's a good time for him to do interviews.

2010-02-27T22:30:00.003-05:00

While Perry was busy tonight looking at slipper chairs, I was looking at books.
I'm leafing through a selection of kids books when I notice a name I recognize: Richard Laymon.
He was a horror author who wrote some pretty... visceral stuff.
And these are kids books!
They're somewhat edgier than RL Stine's Goosebumps or Fear Street, which is to be expected from Laymon, and the couple that I've read have an O. Henry feel to them.
At four by five and a half inches, and less than thirty pages for the most part, these books are perfect for a student who doesn't "enjoy" reading. There's enough to grab them early on and it's short enough that the reader won't get bored or distracted.
I tried finding out more about the publisher online and the most I could really find was that these books were part of an educator targeted release; these copies were ex-library, and of the five, only one, The Intruder, had been checked out, and that was back in '96.

I discovered Laymon back in 2000 after my sister lent me her copy of The Stake, which I enjoyed despite my aversion to vampire fiction. He really won me over with his The Traveling Vampire Show, which, despite the vampire thing, reminded me of Ray Bradbury with a kick.
Laymon passed away in 2001, but Dorchester Publishing is keeping his works in print as well as doing corrected editions of some of his earlier novels, where he made editorial compromises for publication.

He's developed quite a fan base in the last few years, so of course these things are going on ebay tomorrow.

It's out there, somewhere....

2010-02-26T21:30:00.003-05:00

When I was a kid, I was introduced to the classic Universal Monsters through the awesome Dynamite Monster Hall of Fame.

Dynamite was a magazine for fifth and sixth graders from Scholastic Books, available to order through English teachers; they also had a series of books about movies and popculture.
Scholastic is a company designed to get books into the hands of young reader and has created a distribution system that's exclusive to the classroom.
I ordered a lot from them- I even still have most of them in storage somewhere.
Except for this one.

I can't for the life of me find it.
I've seen copies on the internet, but I really want to stumble upon a copy in the real world.

I've been thinking about it recently because Universal has created a site for the Wolfman movie that has a subsite devoted to the Universal Monsters, all the major movies from The Hunchback of Notre Dame to The Creature From The Black Lagoon.

The material in the book is covered in much, much more depth in David Skal's The Monster Show, but nothing beats nostalgia.

Everybody was Kung Fu fightin'...

2010-02-25T20:40:00.003-05:00

Confession time: I love martial arts movies. This is a fairly recent development. I started with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which really was an Art House version of the classic martial arts movie.
From there, I discovered the new stuff making its way across the Pacific: classic historical dramas like Hero and Curse of the Golden Flower to the amazing fantasy of The Legend of Zu.
While this was going on, American cinema had discovered the stylistic flourishes of the genre and transposed them on its own productions like The Matrix and Kill Bill.

But none of this was really new, just a new revolution on the cycle. Thirty years before martial arts movies had their own market share that was pretty impressive.
Now maybe they weren't playing in the nicest movie houses in town; see the bill that Screaming Kung Fu Tiger was playing on?
but they had people in seats and that was what the business was all about.

It was on the small screen as well, David Caradine in the tv show Kung Fu and the movies were getting syndication on Black Belt Theater playing on independent tv stations all over the country.

So of course the publishing industry got into it.

"The first Kung Fu series" and "the most thrilling action-packed series ever published!" read the covers. They're apparently pretty bad. Paperback originals designed to cash in on the martial arts craze.
"Lee Chang" wasn't even the author's real name- he was really Joseph Rosenberger.
I found these two tonight, and they're going on ebay.

Norfolk used to have a martial arts supply store that always had a nifty selection of videos. They'd been there for years, just a block north of where the Loews was. During the recent gentrification push, they moved out- the building is now condos.

I think my favorite film of the genre is The Legend of the 7 Golden Vampires, a co-production between England's Hammer Studios and the Hong Kong studio Shaw Brothers, starring Peter Cushing, a martial arts Gothic vampire extravaganza. Kung Fu Vampires.

What's not to love?

2010-02-24T21:10:00.003-05:00

One of my favorite adventure characters is Repairman Jack, a mercenary/vigilante who's a street level and baseball-bat kind of guy that keeps getting sucked into a war between cosmic forces.

Yesterday, I saw a copy of the center book in the picture while we were out and about- it's The Tomb, by F. Paul Wilson, the first book in the Repairman Jack series and second book in the Adversary series. Heh. It sounds kind of complicated but he's got a flow chart here.

I didn't pick the book up yesterday since I already had a copy in my collection- three copies as a matter of fact. Enlarge the picture with a click and you see "Author's Definitive Edition" under Wilson's name. That's because Wilson had updated the book, first in 1998, and then in 2004.

The setting of New York City had changed a great deal since the original edition in 1984, as did technology- in fact my favorite change was that Repairman Jack wanted to watch a movie- in the original edition it was on Betamax; in 1998 it was just referred to as a tape for a VCR (neither Beta or VHS); and in 2004 it was on dvd.

This just tickles the heck out of me and I've played with the idea of doing a webpage devoted to changes in the editions.

Then I realize I've got more than enough to do.

Like wait for the revised edition of Nightworld, the last book in the Adversary series and Jack's original second book- originally released in 1992, and out of print for years, it had a small press limited edition revision back in 2006 that'll be mass released in 2012.

She's dead... wrapped in plastic...

2010-02-23T23:41:00.004-05:00

With those five words, David Lynch took tv viewers someplace strange, the small town of Twin Peaks in Washington State. "She" was Laura Palmer, prom queen with secrets.
But really, in a town like Twin Peaks, everyone had secrets.
It was a phenomenon, the cast being on the covers of dozens of magazines, viewing parties sprung up all across the country, and the question on everyones' mind was "Who Killed Laura Palmer?".
Of course the publishing industry got in on the act. There were the unauthorized books, like "Welcome to Twin Peaks," an episode guide covering the first season.
The authorized books were a special treat, as clues to the murder were incorporated into The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, written by David Lynch's daughter Jennifer.

There's still a market for The Secret Diary... as Chiller TV periodically reruns the series.
The episode guide... well it kind of pales next to the internet, but it's still popular with completists.
Both of these are things I've picked up recently out and about- however, I do have copies of both, as well as the other Twin Peaks tie-ins, purchased while the show was still on the air.

2010-02-22T23:40:00.005-05:00

I collect comic books along with all the other stuff I gather and I always cringe when a story like this comes around- a copy of Action Comics #1, the first appearance of Superman, sold for a million dollars.

I figure this will get a few people raiding their attics and basements in search of old comics. The thing is, not every comic book is worth that much. There are factors involved like scarcity- less than a hundred copies are estimated to still be in existence- and condition- the one that sold was apparently in... I'm having a hard time finding the proper words. I'd say "excellent condition for something made of cheap paper that's over seventy years old." But to collectors, "excellent" is a grade reserved for few comics- out of the box and into a ~~plastic~~ mylar bag.

At least this book deserves it's value.
Lately, since the mid-nineties or so, there have been speculator driven moments- most recently Amazing Spiderman #583, the issue where Obama meets Spiderman, is fetching all sorts of prices on ebay. Back in 1992, it got the kick off with "The Death of Superman" in Superman #75 (they restarted the numbering for some silly reason), where it seemed he'd died in battle.

Speculators when ape-crap crazy buying up multiple copies- you couldn't find one for months until they reprinted it; if you were, well, READING the comics you were out of luck. Now, it's available for .88 on ebay.

The problem with the speculators was that the publishers were doing multiple covers and huge over-runs of issues and it seemed as if every other issue was an EVENT.

This lead to what I refer to as the Implosion, when publishers like Valiant , Defiant and Broadway came in like gangbusters into an all ready over saturated market, burned brightly then burned out.

Of course, the thing to remember is that comics are for reading- and these days, you can get a collection that includes Action #1 for as little as $14.99 in the Superman Chronicle vol 1, or a nice hardcover edition of the Superman Archives for $49.99 .

2010-02-21T23:37:00.004-05:00

I'm still going through stuff in boxes and I turned up this little gem tonight:
It's actually a tie-in, written from the screenplay for Zoltan, Hound of Dracula. Really.

See? I can't make this stuff up. It's from 1978, I actually remember seeing the ad in the local paper for it. I ran across the book at a flea market and picked it up, not for the Dracula connection, though I do love the classic Universal horror films, but because of this:

It's an ad. In a book. A cigarette ad, to be precise. Once upon a time, such things were not uncommon in paperbacks (check out this article on it in the NYT). So really, I was thinking more tobacciana, tobacco related collectibles, rather than horror novel.

Since then, my drive-in movie-d-grade pictures loving self has found that Hounds of Dracula looks good on the shelf next to the Norton Critical Text of Dracula and Peter Haining's The Vampire Omnibus, so I've decided not to sell it.

2010-02-20T22:45:00.003-05:00

We find the coolest stuff in the oddest places.
One of my favorite authors is William Gibson, author of the sci-fi classic Neuromancer as well as the contemporary thrillers Pattern Recognition and Spook Country.
Back in 2000 a camera crew followed him around and recorded his thoughts and observations on society for a documentary called "No Maps for These Territories."
I've heard about this movie for years and today I picked up a copy.

It's kind of disjointed but I like it. The best part is Gibson in the back seat of the limo, just riding around- rather like the highway scene in Tarkovsky's Solaris, riding riding riding... going where?

2010-02-19T23:49:00.003-05:00

I should have written a real post tonight, but I got distracted playing The Sims again.
This time, I set out to re-create the cover to Caitlin Kiernan's novella In The Garden of Poisonous Flowers:
I used to play The Sims a lot. Then I put down the crackpipe.

It's just as addicting as I remember.

Well, there's $1.98 I'll never get back...

2010-02-18T21:36:00.003-05:00

While out and about today, I found a video tape, "Under the Spell of Harry Potter."
It's a tape of a lecture by Stephen Dollins, according to the box, "an ex-satanist high priest."

Well... I had to see it. And at $1.98... I'll skip two of my three large sweet teas from McDonald's tomorrow.

Ugh. It's two hours and forty minutes long. I think I may have seen thirty minutes worth.
Dollins believes there's an occult conspiracy to corrupt America spiritually through Pokemon, Teletubbies and ... you guessed it Harry Potter.

Watching this video was almost physically painful. It's a one cam setup centered on Dollins, who, while I'm loathe to engage in ad hominem attacks, is just awful in his black jacket and a look that says failed bitter ex-goth. He's there for a group called the Prophecy Club- which you can read about here; I can't begin to describe them.

But I did see enough to realize where Dollins got the basis of his research from: The Onion.
Yep, the humor magazine that did a heckuva parody article about how JK Rowling was a satanist and her novels were satanic propaganda. Now, the Onion is pretty clever. I fell for their article on Barnes and Noble opening a branch in Cambodia ("Cambodia has all the signs of being a book-friendly country," Day said. "Did you know that only one Cambodian in 10,000 has a television set? That, to me, is the hallmark of a literate culture.") when I recieved it as a fax back in 1997.

Dollins further loses credibility when I find, on the Prophecy Club website, another two hour, forty minute lecture called ILLUMINATI: GAME OR BLUEPRINT FOR WORLD DOMINATION, where he contends that the collectible card game Illuminati: New World Order is a, well, "blueprint for world domination." That pretty much covers it.

Right.

I think I might pass the video around, as a challange. How far can you get? I know when I got it, I had to rewind it from about the half way mark.

2010-02-17T23:03:00.003-05:00

Regrets- I've quite a few, especially when it comes to books I didn't pick up when I had my chance.

Right now, the Donning/Starblaze Press edition of Thea Von Harbou's Metropolis from the eighties has been on my mind the past few days. It was a new edition of the novel Fritz Lang (the author's husband) turned into the classic movie. The twist was Donning had been hiring comic book artists to do illustrations for classic adventure novels, and for Metropolis they'd hired Michael Kaluta.

Kaluta, with writer Denny O'Neil, in the seventies did the artwork for what I consider the definitive comic book translation of The Shadow- the pulp hero and Old Time Radio classic.
So Kaluta knew how to do deco urban landscapes and beautiful women.

... I just (as I'm writing this post) found out that Kaluta has a page on his website devoted to his work on Metropolis- go look at it here.
Here's a look at the cover:
(image taken from Kulata's website as not to steal any of his bandwidth. no infringement intended.)

The reason Metropolis has been on my mind recently is that there's a new edition of the movie with thirty minutes of footage thought to be lost. This is awesome for a couple of reasons: A) back in the eighties and again in 2002 they thought they'd found as much of the movie as they could- this new footage was found in 2008;B) if it's possible to find something like that, then perhaps there's a copy of Tod Browning's lost horror movie London After Midnight.

The restoration of the eighties has a special place in my heart since I saw it on the big screen. Disco synth god Georgio Moroder tried to make an edition as complete as possible and then scored it with the assisntance of several rock musicians, including Queen and Pat Benatar.
My favourite piece from that edition was Bonnie (Total Eclipse of the Heart) Tyler's "Here She Comes", check out the video here:

By the way, the original novel is in public domain and available here in the internet archive for your reading pleasure.

2010-02-16T21:27:00.004-05:00

A little late on posting this tonight, no later than usual really, but I've been preoccupied with the time suck that is The Sims and the Olympics.
But yesterday we picked up a stack of Gor novels in our travels- I've blogged about them here, but since last blogging about them, I've read a little more about them.

It seems a lot of people really, really hate them.
Misogynistic is a term that turns up a lot. Badly written shows up as well.
The thing is, they've been out of circulation for years.

This gives them an air of mystery.

I figure, by putting them on ebay, I'm taking away a little of the mystery.
Or I'm a smut peddler. Whatever.

True story: Dark Horse Publishing was going to re-release the series three years ago. There was such a outcry over this that they canceled their plans.

My name is Victoria Winters...

2010-02-15T19:33:00.004-05:00

If you're of a certain age, you'll recognize that phrase.
Rushing home everyday to catch Dark Shadows on tv.
Alexandra Moltke's voice over as the haunting theme music played.
Vampires and werewolves and ghosts, oh my!
It covered all manner of staples of the horror genre within the conventions of the soap opera format between 1966 and 1971.
So of course there were tie-in books. Over thirty in fact, written by Dan Ross using his wife Marilyn's byline.

I'd picked up one here, another there. Then I bought a bag of a dozen books that contained two more. I figured four was enough for a lot, so they're on ebay right now.
(Dark Shadows, Barnabas, Quentin and the Scorpio Curse, Barnabas, Quentin and the Magic Potion and Barnabas Collins - A Personal Picture Album.)

Here's the opening moments of the show for those of you too young to know about it and a treat for those of you who can:

And yes, there was a revival starring Ben Cross as Barnabas. We picked up the dvd set (all 13! episodes) for $5 at the Raleigh Flea Market.

I guess it was worth that.

2010-02-14T21:01:00.003-05:00

I do real well selling lots of books on ebay. I'll sell single copies too, but a lot of four or more books seems to be my thing.
When I saw these on a shelf at a thrift store:
I knew they'd be going up on ebay. The Rogue Angel series came about in the wake of Tomb Raider, the adventures of a globe trotting archeologist who fights evil with the sword of Joan of Arc. Published bimonthly by Gold Eagle- the "men's fiction" wing of Harlequin books- they've got the house name of "Alex Archer" on the cover, while crediting the person who actually wrote the book is thanked on the copyright page.

It's sort of funny I'd find these in the wake of the Doc Savages because really, they're his thematic heirs.

Pulp adventure still lives.

2010-02-12T23:08:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, we picked up another stack of Doc Savage books.
It's totally pulptastic. Fifteen books, three sequential sets (books 16-20, 51-55, and 71-75).
After seeing my earlier Doc Savage lots do so well, I wasted no time putting these on ebay.

2010-02-12T23:08:00.000-05:00

Tonight, we're decompressing from a long day and watching the Olympic Opening Ceremonies.

We'll have a real post up tomorrow.

2010-02-11T22:19:00.001-05:00

I've been excavating boxes at the apartment and it's been profitable, both financially- see the Superbabes book- and intellectually- I'm finding books I'd forgotten getting.

I've been reading Wired: A Romance by Gary Wolf in my free time the last couple of days.
It's a look at the news magazine Wired by one of its writers. Wired, to me, was all that was awesome about the early years of the cyber revolution, back when the internet was still a wild frontier. And lots of dayglow ink used.

Seriously.
I'd read it in places where they had blacklight and the pages would fluoresce.

It's still pretty cool- they recently did a contest where a writer left his old life behind and challenged readers to track him down. Read about that here.

2010-02-10T23:44:00.002-05:00

I was going to write about the History Channel's show about the Mothman, the book The Mothman Prophecies by John Keel, and the Richard Gere movie inspired by it.
But the show wasn't really that good.

Then I thought, with the Olympics coming up, I'd write about the tv show Whistler, which was like Twin Peaks meets snowboarding- even maybe put a clip of it in the blog... then I tried to find a clip on Youtube. "Whistler" in terms of searching has been co-opted by the Olympics.

Then, since I sold a lot of nine books tonight, I'd write about the Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators series, but I realized I'd written about them back in August.

So I'm just going to say to heck with it and go to bed.

2010-02-09T22:20:00.002-05:00

They never explain what happened or why, but the eerie absence of humans in the "History" Channel's Life After People is fascinating.
LAP's premise is that people are ... gone. What's left are animals and all our stuff. Buildings. Cars. Vacation Spots- that's the topic of tonight's show.
Including roller coasters and cruise ships.
A week
A month...
Six Weeks...
Six Months...
One Year...
Five Years...
Eighty Years...
A Hundred Years...

The collapse of the roller coasters is amazing- one of my favorite movies is The Death of Ocean View Amusement Park and the climax of the movie is the collapse of the roller coaster... the effects have, of course, improved.

The fact that fruitcakes WILL survive mankind, immune to bacteriological breakdown due to the chemical reaction of sugar, flour and alcohol is pretty nifty.

The best part is where they discuss the collapse of the Palm Springs new ecology- the golf courses and hotels- and compare it to the Salton Sea- an eco-nightmare in SoCal.

What does this have to do with books?

One of the best non-fiction books in 2007 was the inspiration for this show, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Weisman focuses on the physical effects, much like the show, but he also examines places like Chernobyl.

Even though it's published as non-fiction, I like to think of The World Without Us as Science Fiction in the purest sense.

Pyrex Insanity...

2010-02-08T19:02:00.002-05:00

I always feel like I'm cheating when I use video to pad out my post but when I saw it I had to spread the word. HOT Doctor Pepper. I encountered this commercial:

in a vintage advertising forum. The idea of Hot Dr Pepper is insane enough.
But check out the pan they boil it in (at timestamps 11-16 seconds).

Yes, that's Pyrex.
And as happy as I am to see it show up in a commercial, I'd really like to see it in something like a soup commercial.

Now, if I could find the commercial from the early seventies for Corningware where the heat it's on is enough to melt a metal pan, while Tubular Bells played as the sound track. (Does anyone else remember this commercial? When I describe it to people, they look at me funny.)

2010-02-07T22:59:00.002-05:00

Ok, occasionally I pick up a book that I'd be willing to sell if it were sellable, but if it isn't, well... chalk that up to experience.
The other day we picked up a copy of the movie tie in book to Robert Altman's Prét-à-Porter. It doesn't go for much, so it's on to the bookshelf it goes.

Which is too bad.

But it isn't. Altman's one of our favourite directors and Prét-à-Porter (Ready to Wear) is one we both love.

So getting a behind the scenes peek at the production with the script AND Tracy Ullman's production library for $2.98... I think we can live with it.

2010-02-06T22:52:00.003-05:00

I'm too busy hopping around the apartment making SQUEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE noises to do a proper blog post here.

Yesterday, ex-pat Brit author Neil Gaiman announced that he's going to write an episode of BBC's long running sci-fi show Doctor Who.

To translate out of nerd and into terms my parents can understand: it's like getting John Grisham to write an episode of Law & Order.

Gaiman's a multi-award winning fantasiest who's written several best sellers including American Gods and Neverwhere.

Here he is reading his poem "Instructions"-

Enjoy.

2010-02-05T22:39:00.002-05:00

We watched a video clip of me from 1992 tonight.
The local CBS affiliate stopped by the store I was working at and needed a sound bite regarding the Madonna book Sex.
I'd forgotten what I looked like back when I had hair.
I wish I could find my copy of the book.

Of course, these days I'd just put it on ebay.

It was massive, and heavy due to its metal covers. Sex did have a bad flaw (insert Madonna joke here)- it was spiral bound and the pages had a tendency to come loose. These days, it's highly collectible and nearly impossible to find still in the original mylar sleeve.

2010-02-04T22:51:00.002-05:00

Another long day, but pretty satisfying.
Lots of books listed on ebay. Several sales packed up to go into the mailbox.
Today started early with our regular Richmond trip. There, we picked up a Pembroke table to take to a customer in the Northern Neck.

(Perry will be writing about the table tomorrow night. He's tired tonight. Fortunately for him, since I'd had an upset stomach early this morning, I'd written an extra blogpost while killing time at o'dark thirty.)

We didn't get home until 7:30.
Perry talked me away from the computer for a little while around 10:30, but I'm back since I had to blog.

And so I have. Soon, I crash, because it looks like tomorrow is auction day.
Those are always crazy.

Beam Me Up Scotty.....It's the Star Trek Cookbook

2010-02-03T20:13:00.006-05:00

I know Clay usually writes the book blog, and I bow to his hard earned expertise in this category normally.

But come on, I found the Star Trek Cookbook.

We keep a book or two in the car to read when we're on the road, either to ourselves or aloud if they're particularly amusing in some way. This one was one that required out loud reading. Several times.

I mean, when was the last time you saw a recipe for Klingon Skull Stew with Tripe? (Yeah, it starts with a calf skull, the finished stew is served in a bowl with the skull floating in the center.) I could go on and on. But I won't

In all fairness, I thought some of the recipes, which are broken down roughly by cast member of all the various Trek crew members from many different Trek versions (I liked Captain Janeway the best, but I digress), sounded okay. And the behind the scenes stories about the food styling for the show were pretty interesting, who knew that a cucumber wrapped in saran wrap with the right lighting looked like an alien sea creature on a buffet table?

I thought I'd give one recipe a whirl, and found out that at least in that case, I doubt the recipe was tested. I tried "Scotty's Lemon Chicken", easy enough chicken chunks with onion in thickened sauce made of white wine and lemon with broccoli. WAY too acidic. And I cooked the broccoli for half the suggested time and ended up with broccoli goo.

We'll eat almost anything, (well Clay will, I say no to mushrooms and seafood), and we both ended up scraping the broccoli into the trash and ate the chicken with some plain rice.

We decided not to try this again.

With over 2000 cookbooks to cook from, I don't think I wan to try this again, so on eBay the book goes for sale, some Trekkie will be very happy and appreciate it more than I will!

2010-02-02T21:11:00.003-05:00

Yesterday, I wrote about a perk of working for yourself, namely doing computer work in your pajamas.
Today, I'll deal with the flipside of the coin-
It's nearly 10pm. I'm in my pajamas, yes.
I'm listing on eBay. And packing quilts.
And researching books.

Our day doesn't quite end at 5pm.

I did find this awesome score today:

Twenty eight books in the Time/Life book series The Good Cook. I've seen similar lots go for as much as $150.

2010-02-01T15:21:00.002-05:00

Knockouts and Powerhouses sold for $31. Not bad for five minutes work.
We're still "snowbound," less by snow and more by circumstance today- no place we shop would have gotten new stuff this weekend.
So, I'm listing some more books online and packing up stuff that sold this weekend.

In my jammies.

Because I can.

2010-01-31T23:00:00.004-05:00

Today, I was going through a box of stuff and I found this book:
It's called Knockouts & Powerhouses (2nd edition), a supplement for the roleplaying game (I'm not making this up) Superbabes. It's kind of like Dungeons and Dragons, but the characters the players create are all female superheroes and they have to fight female supervillains.

So, in short: socially challenged guys sit around a table and imagine being women in spandex, fighting other women in spandex.

Note: it's not subtext if it's text.

I'm sure there's been a game of Superbabes that's had female players.
Once.
Somewhere.
I mean, statistically, it COULD happen.

Anyway. I found this book and looked it up. I didn't find it listed anywhere.
I did find the boxed starter set for Superbabes. It sold today for $51.
So of course I listed Knockouts & Powerhouses on ebay.

STOP THE INSANITY!

2010-01-30T21:20:00.002-05:00

Does anyone still remember Susan Powter? The ... energetic , elfin fitness advocate had her fifteen minutes, but today, she's sort of a popculture footnote. In fact, her big book, Stop The Insanity, seems to be out of print at the publisher except in Spanish.That's ok. Because you can find copies of it, in English, at the local thrift store.

2010-01-29T21:24:00.003-05:00

We had three books for sale in a single lot recently. They're books about antique doll clothing and apparently they're quite collectible- the cheapest ones on the net were going for three times what we were selling these for. They didn't sell, but we'll relist them separately next week. But we did have some interest...

Jan 28 11:56 am

Hello, how much would shipping be to me here in Canada?? I would love to have all three of these books!! Please give the best rate as I am on a limited budget...I would give you the 50$ today if I could get shipping inc...:)
Please let me know
Ms Name Redacted

She's asking this ten hours before the end of the auction and Perry and I are on the road.
When she's asking this, the auction had been running for five days prior. And she's offering what we're asking, but with free shipping.

Jan 28 12:09 pm

I just wanted to add that they would be coming to a good home, I dress dolls and design patterns for them as well, I heard these books were very good for the french fashions, they were never sold in Canada so I would love to finally get them and see them! My ladies here in my room would thank-you!! I just need a good shipping price and I will bid!
Thank-you

Ms Name Redacted

It's nice sentiment, but we don't care WHAT kind of homes these books go to.

Jan 28 6:58 pm

Hello, the bid is almost over, can you please tell me how much shipping would be to me? Grande Prairie Alberta Canada T8X 0A9

Thank-you!!
Ms Name Redacted

Because this was her latest email in the series, it was at the top when I was checking my email, and as such the one I answered.

Jan 28 7:08 pm

I'm sorry, we only ship within the US. We've had too many packages get lost when shipping to Canada.
Thank you for your interest.

Clay

Perry has had several packages "go missing" and then the buyers have demanded a refund. Canada Post can't track things sent via US Postal Service.
And for my part, I don't like to ship outside of the continental US- I got bad feedback from a customer in Alaska because a book took too long to arrive.

Jan 28 7:41 pm

Ah! I have over 120 purchases and 99.9 were from the states. Oh well...we both loose I guess :) I wish you well.

Ms Name Redacted

At the risk of sounding snarky, actually, she loses- we'll still sell the books. In fact, we're going to list them individually for prices closer to their real "value."

2010-01-28T23:32:00.002-05:00

Perry just did the math.
I did more on ebay in the last two days than I did in a week at the bookstore.
I'm crazy busy tonight doing invoices.

And tired.

I didn't realize I'd left this post unfinished and nearly went to bed.
Done now.