Garage Sale Saturday 1 - Pick ups

     I was driving home from work on Friday around 3pm, and saw a sign at the local Salvation Army rec center on Macgregor Blvd here in Fort Myers advertising a community yard sale in their parking lot for Saturday morning. I got up extra early to get down there with high hopes to find some good books.

     I brought my wife and son with me since it was so close to the house, my wife looking for Christmas items, and games/toys for my son. With in five minutes I had found a few things:

     Some ancient Ultima PC games, and one Commodore 64 Ultima game in the box with all the manuals, cloth maps and so on. In the same dirty storage bin i found Baulder's Gate for PC, and a "RPG Collection Set" that has 7 CDs inside... including all the Might & Magic games, Quest For Glory games, and Ultima games. With DosBOX I know I could get the games to work on a modern PC. Also found the first Might & Magic for Commodore 64/128, with tons of home-copied back up disks, saved games, and even some cheats. He also through in Riven (sequel to Myst on cd rom)Receipts for everything was still in the boxes, and the tip books were still sealed. All for $3.00. Ebay price: $130 - $150. I could easily get $30 for each of the boxed games, $10 each for the maps, and $10 each for the loose games. Tip guides sealed could get $10 to $20 each.

At the table right next to that table, i spotted boxes of books. Mostly political books which I could resell, some bibles and Michael Crichton books which i could not resell for .10 each. In the bottom of one box I found:

 

I recognized the first edition cover right away, although I have seen non-first editions with same cover variation. I have never owned a first edition in hard cover, but a few paperbacks which have the same cover, but in black. Very collectible, King's first fantasy novel, and a really good read if you missed it. I paid .50 cents, which is a pretty good deal. Ebay price: About $25 on a bad day. Paper backs I can normally get the same price for if it is in REALLY good condition.

 

The rest of the day was pretty much a bust. My wife bought some super hero socks from a "Sock Lady." A sock lady is a woman who for some reason has a thousand pairs of new socks and sells them for fifty cents a pair and drives a Lexus. You will see the sock lady at most flea markets. Also got my son a Wii game called M&M Adventure or some such. Went to about 10 garage sales after that and found exactly nothing. old people are coming back down to my part of Florida, we call them Snow Birds. The first thing they do is throw out all their old people shit. Broken telephones, radios, a box of old Beringer white Zinfandel corks, a box of 20 year old pens, and so on. Rinse and repeat. I live in a highly populated higher income area along a river, and you would think these old bastards would throw out some good stuff. You would think.

 

One sale in particular had all the items I mentioned above in the same sale including decks of old liquor playing cards, chipped glasses, a box of cords, three broken printers, a box of open tissues and more. The printers, obviously broken has a price of $30 each on them.

 

Not a bad day really. Not going to sell the book, as I needed that for my collection. The games I'm going to offer to a friend who is really into old PC games, if he does not want them, then Ebay. I may make $100 after everything is said and done on a $3 investment.