Sunday, January 12, 2014

Flea Market Pick Ups 5: Star Trek & Castlevania

Breakfast first.

     I really had no intentions to go out and find books today. The longest week/month in my life, working tons of hours and then deciding to go to Tampa for the weekend just killed all my energy for anything outside of work. I know it's been a while since I've updated, and I'm sorry for that, but I'll try to get back in the swing of things with this post. Back to the farm: My wife and I decided to go downtown for breakfast this morning at The Oasis in Fort Myers. Best food, servers and owners are seriously friendly. It was here that we decided to go and hit the Flea Market nice and early.

The book depository.

     We walked all around and looked at everything and got a few things for my wife (pictures later). I went to my typical haunt in the building outside the main complex and ran in to my buddy busy as hell selling books. Check out the crowd!

Digging for fantasy gold.

     He pulled me back behind the shelves where his car was parked, told me how he finally got to see the blog and loved it. I guess we are fans of each other now in a strange way. He dug through some boxes and found two he saved aside, and put them on the tailgate of his truck for me to take a look at.

Tailgate wonderland!

     Found about ten books I did not own, nice old crusty first editions in my ball park. My wife added some magazines to the bunch and a movie and he gave me everything for $16.00. "I know this is over your $10 budget, but I think it's a pretty good deal". Yeah, it was. Before I show you the goods, here is a few pictures of behind the stalls:

The Nazi storage warehouse at the end of Lost Ark

     There is no lack of inventory in this place. Movies, books, comics, magazines, vinyl, games.. just tons of stuff. I found a cool book back here unrelated to Science Fiction believe it or not.

Artax holding the books to the table.


As always, you can click to zoom.

 The wife haul. She spent more than me, and we both blew our budgets.

     Above is my wife's finds. All but the plates were pretty much given to me by our buddy at the book exchange. The Dragonslayer graphic novel is the first of two parts, which I have owned before but mailed them to a fan of a Dragonslayer page I made in the 90's as a gift. Good to have one of them back! The Starlog mags are from the early 80's, which was the golden era of Starlogs. I could do several articles just on them! Oh, I almost forgot! The Worlds of Power book.



     Every five or so pages had some kind of game hint written upside down. I'm not sure if this is something kids actually bought for the hints (as the book sucked) or they were just so in to the game, that they had to have some kind of closure to it. Either way, that's all I got, see you next time.

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

New Year's Resolution

I took this picture before I headed out to work one morning

     I'll start off by saying Happy New Year to everyone out there. I hope everyone had a safe and happy new year's eve, drank tons of booze, and maybe read a book. Personally, my wife and I had a pretty cool party going on, had some new friends over and watched the ball drop in relative peace.

     2013 was good for this blog. I did not put as much in to it as far as time from the year previous, but I sat down and made more plans if anything. If I nothing to post or was busy, I did not force it, and just posted nothing for that week. The last month has been much of that: I have transitioned in to my new job. The holidays are here, which is super stressful for the beer business. Lots of family flying in a out of Florida, coupled with the excuses from above make me so busy I can't find time to go looking for books. No books, means no post most of the time unfortunately. Not that this stopped anyone from viewing the blog however. Readership was up again, and the year finished strong with almost 10,000 unique views over the last few months... and growing.

     Thanks to everyone who has followed me, read my rants, and found books with me along the way. I'm going to try and make 2014 a better year for the blog, find better books, and travel further than last year.