So I took my family to Disney World for the weekend, and stayed in one of the nice hotels in the park. My son, being a huge Disney fan and also being of that age where he can enjoy it, had a great time. My wife discovered Pin Trading, which is described here.
I took this picture after I bought her some of the first pins, and later surprised her with more. My current hobby costs me about $10 a week, one day of Pin Trading cost me almost $70.
So one of my favorite book hang outs of yore is closing it's doors for good. One for the Books of Cape Coral, which across the bridge from me has an aggressive rare and unique book collection spanning several centuries. As you all know, I look almost exclusively for Fantasy and Sci-Fi, and they also have a large selection of rare and out of prints to choose from. As they are closing, everything until the end of the week is 50% off. I took the opportunity to grab some things i normally would not buy. I'll also mention that they research almost every title that would be worth money, and already have those books separated from the bunch and individually priced. In short, they know what they have.
This is their Fantasy/Sci-Fi Isle. The top shelves have the rare stuff, and some oddities. Each end cap has a good selection of golden age science fiction in plastic bags so you don't damage them. I personally don't keep my books in bags. Not sure why.
An example of what i consider "top shelf" stuff. Early 70's Asimov magazines, and Galaxy mags. They were priced at $10.00 each, which is pretty high. At half off that's still $5.00 a piece. Out of my price range today. Having dropped close to a grand at Disney, I'm not eager to splurge any time soon.
Sorry the picture is dark, the Florida sunshine was coming in through the window. Normally covered, they were taking things off the windows and walls. Old Starlog mags, comic book oddities and graphic novels. Nothing really special, but cool if you are a fan of a specific thing. There was also a small section of used Dungeon & Dragon's books.
Right under the magazine shelf is all the Hard Covers. Great selection, but nothing I was too interested in. I have way too many Hard Covers to be buying more at this point unless it's pretty rare. Once upon a time i found some gems in this same spot.. maybe eight years ago. If there was anything valuable in here, it had been picked over because of the clearance.
One of the aforementioned end caps with rare bagged books. I shopped from these racks for at least 15 minutes.. until the wife yelled at me that my time was up. I took my small stack of books up to the register, thanked the owner for years of cool selections and good finds and made my way out. He mentioned at the register the business was for sale for $25,000. If only I had the money to do such a thing..
Anyways. Here is what I took home with me:
I'm not going to list the authors and titles like I normally do, you can see what they are. Click to enlarge if you have a problem seeing any details. I take all my pictures with my stupid camera on my iPhone as opposed to bringing a digital camera with me. In my previous adventures, people don't like it when you start snapping photos in their store. A few things stand out with the books here, one of which is ZARDOZ. Fucking Zardoz. I saw this in the bagged books for some reason. I asked the owner why it was mixed in with those, and he remarked that it was rare. Rare! He had $5.00 on it, which in my opinion is $5.00 too much.
Yeah I bought it. How could I not? A quick Internet search proved it was slightly rare and only had two printings. Why did they ever decide to have a second printing? Who decided to include pictures of Sean Connery's chest hair in the movie tie-in? I do not know what I'm going to do with this book. I think it must be destroyed. My brother ate his words not too many posts ago..
But not to ignore the cool Galaxy Mags, which they had many of scattered around. I grabbed the two that would be the most significant in terms of its contents. Love Asimov, so got that one out of habit. So... all in all I had a pretty good day. Spent a little more than I wanted to, but found some really cool golden age books. Maybe doubled the money I spend. Ironically, I think made out on Zardoz.
Thanks Sean Connery.
