BibliophileBullpen

3 blacks and a gray
Originally uploaded by armv_cats.

so far so good . . .went kitten fishing last night. I caught 3, someone else reeled in 4. On the whole a good haul. I started listing books and products as an Amazon vendor . . . and sold a couple of items, but I am thinking too little too late. The truck is acting wonky and a new batch of bills are warming the mailbox – it’s a lot like swimming in quicksand.

cool tool • ebay will now let folks put videos on their listings.

site to see • as a result of a “blogosphere brouhaha” the Copyright database is now accessible to all free of charge on a record-by-record basis through the U.S. Copyright Office Web site at www.copyright.gov/records/.

banktoaster • Reading guides for Terry Pratchett’s 33 Discworld novels.

cool tool • ebay will now let folks put videos on their listings.

JC Penny Toddler’s Recliner
$129.99 Toddlers will love a chair of their own for reading, playing or watching videos. Hand crafted pine wood for sturdy construction. Seat height from floor is 10″. Ages 2-9 years. Denim is cotton, leopard print is polyester, beige is vinyl. Woven polyester back. Polyurethane fill. Surface clean only. 18¾x24½x28″H. USA.

I am not sure what it is that disturbs me most about this picture perhaps it is the fact that CHILDREN DON’T NEED RECLINERS! . . . I probably would have thought it was just darling if the child had been picture holding a freaking book. I mean all children should have a reading chair, even if it’s a bean bag – a special REMOTE CONTROL LESS spot on the planet they can call their own . . . but to cultivate couch potatoes at such a young age cannot POSSIBLY be healthy – and I imagine this a benefit of having ringside seats at the decline and fall of a civilization.

bento6, originally uploaded by jgodsey.

todays lunch, Onigiri with furikake, rolled in sesame. I haven’t mastered the omelet yet, but i found that if i cook the eggs slowly in sesame oil with some furikake, it is delicious. Sooner or later I will be able to get strips for stuffing the maki. I tossed some oshinko and seafood strips into the cracks. needless to say this didn’t make it to lunch

Hello Satan Thermos, originally uploaded by jgodsey.

aside from my Hello Satan Bentos I needed something for my Udon
I need to get some more stickers

A friend goaded me into book hunting today. It’s almost laughable…here I am with nary two farthings to rub together and I am gonna spend them on book speculation?

See, things USED to be different here . . . like anywhere I suppose, there isn’t a book store for 46 miles – a real one anyway, not just a paperback swap (those don’t take anything more than a few years old anyway) and despite the handful of thrift shops there aren’t any ‘good books’ to be found. Online selling as we know is glutted from folks with low or NO overheads getting their hands on many many thousands of cheap books and listing them all at ridiculously low prices, so basically all the common titles aren’t worth shit. One would have to be on the look out for uncommon titles. Fair enough, but where do you look for such stuff? The region I live in was blue collar for many decades and is now only one generation of white color away. So, even if the folks value reading they DON’T buy good books, (good books: books that hold their value.) You can troll every yard sale and flea market for 10 weeks, the best you can come away with will be a few cookbooks, oprah titles, outdated text books, beaten up kids books, trade fiction and poorly made bibles . If they buy books at all, they buy them at the big box stores and the devaluate before they are even put in the bag. Oh I am not saying you won’t find a few things here and there, books migrate, but you aren’t going to find enough to justify the looking.

Needless to say, I went and looked. I figure I got a few pennies, I will take a flutter. Don’t get me wrong I LOVE trolling for books. If all the money that flows through my fingers didn’t already have someone else’s name attached to it, it’s what I would be doing just for the joy of it. What I hate is the disappointment. You lay your hands on a good title, ferrinstance I came up with a nice clean 1st of Gladys Taber’s Amber (a book about a cat, ironic, no?) only to discover that it’s worth less than ten bucks. Which means even if I DO sell manage to sell it, it will not offset the labor involved with buying, listing and packing it, and most importantly it will not offset the other books bought along with it.

Let me vague that one up for you . . . .when you BUY books, the few GOOD books in the bunch, should outweigh the other stuff you bought. You go out and scout for books (wow….deja vu…I know I have written this before, sorry) You buy 10 books – 2 are worth a damn 8 are worth damn all. So the expense for the 8 has to be covered by the profit of the 2. Yes, you can extrapolate this to mean all the books you bought over the year, the bad has to be covered by the good. As you go through life as a bookseller, and you learn your ass from a hot rock, eventually you should get to a point where you buy 8 good books and 2 bad ones, nes pa? HOWEVER with the recent devaluation of the market, my good-shit-o-meter is now useless. Where ‘I’ see 10 potentially good books, or books that USED to have value, I trundle them home to find the market says otherwise – hence the disappointment. I am back to buying 1 good book out of every five. Not only can I not afford to eat the loss, but the depression that comes from realizing your lifetime’s worth of knowledge cannot help you make a living, makes you dread even the attempt.

So, it was end of the month half price day at the thrift shop, I spent 10 dollars and came away with a few worthless books and about four solid 15 dollar books – which I promptly listed along with everyone else’s $15 books. When they eventually DO sell, they will not really cover the costs of the buying and the selling and the labor – which means I really should have put the 10 dollars into the gas tank to get me to the next job interview. (I’m averaging about three rejections a week – a personal best.)

j @ 5 am
who regrets not getting hired by the phone sex company, that would have at least given me something do with this insomnia.

something new • Paul Theroux reviews a new biography of Henry Morton Stanley (you know Stanley & Livingston) for the New York Times. I may not get around to reading the book, but I the reviews are another matter. I mention it, because I am a sucker for travel writing, those who can’t do travel, like to read about thems that do, or something like that – anyway this is what he said in the Times: “In September of 1973 I set off from London and took the 25,000-mile trip that was to become The Great Railway Bazaar. Last year I set off from London and took exactly the same trip. But it was all different, of course. I am writing about it now.”

well worth reading • Bullpen member Madeline Kripke is featured in a terrific six page piece by Bruce McKinney on Americana Exchange. In his words “. . . . Madeline Kripke, an extraordinary woman who lives among her books, manuscripts and ephemera in a frenzied embrace with words and their history” and man, he ain’t kidding.

Make sure you read to the end, Madeline excerpts some of her best drool worthy pieces of her collection for us.

When I grow up can I be like Madeline? either one I’m not picky.

site to see • from BoingBoing – a heads up about a gallery of decorated endpapers @ Drawger.

At least they didn’t take them OUT OF THE BOOKS to present them.