BibliophileBullpen

Dear Bibliobull:

I’m normally a book collector, but recently succumbed to a temptation and purchased the first comic appearance of Donald Duck. This is a huge book for a comic (9 1/2 X 12 3/4), and has a fair amount of surface grime, made more obvious by a prior attempt by a prior owner to remove a pencil signature. The cover is on pulp-ish, non-glossy paper. What would you use for gentle surface cleaning? A document cleaning pad?

Duck and Cover

Since it has an ink printed surface you are correct in avoiding anything abrasive. Your choices are:
Absorene which is like a clean grease free silly putty, which also crumbles and allows you to roll the bits around collecting up surface dirt.

Document cleaning pads which will scatted tiny eraser granules over the surface for you to gently rub in.

Or ground up erasers of varying kinds: art gum or white vinyl. If you want to experiment you can use a cheese or nutmeg grater (avoid pink rubber erasers will just dry out when ground up.)

All of these perform the same function ADHESION, getting the dirt to adhere to the granule surface so you can blow it off; Absorene is just the ‘stickiest’. You can repeat this as often as you like as long as you don’t apply too much pressure to the grains and actually ‘scrub’ against the inks.

Dear Bibliobull:

I recently purchased a book off the net (one supposedly in “fine” condition . . . ha), and when it arrived, I discovered it had 3 splats of dried blood on the fore-edge. It’s gross, but I want to keep the book. Any suggestions?

Bloody Shame

Go to the hardware store and buy a sanding sponge, these are found near the sandpaper, and come in various sizes and grits. They are mostly used for sanding spackle and dry wall. With this you can ‘erase’ the surface of the fore-edge, especially good for general fore-edge grime. This won’t work on faux deckle of course.

Any bleaching agent will drain the red out and turn it brown or perhaps yellow. If the drops are small enough, perhaps hydogen peroxide on a q-tip? Since you can’t wash it, the proteins will never completely go away so the best you can do is make them less noticeable.

My hot plate died, well I didn’t know it had died until I went to check on my pierogies and found them floating sadly in the pan like empty poached eggs.  Now, there IS a good reason I use the hot plate…..I simply loathe the gas company. I haven’t used my oven for over a decade, which anyone who has stuck it out with me the last 4 years will remember that I am a big proponent for small batch cooking and heating an entire oven for a lonely little casserole seems painfully expensive to me; just more pennies i’d rather keep to myself than give to those money grubbing  fuckwits.   So, when I swapped out the stove with one that wasn’t broken, I left the entire thing disconnected, apparently there is no way to run gas to the stovetop while NOT feeding the oven’s pilot light.   I can live with a hot plate along with my counter-top oven and fridge-top microwave (no there is no such a thing, that’s just where I keep mine) and the four of us have been going along swimmingly until the pierogi incident.  When I had gone out LOOKING for the damn hot plate, I ended up going to three big box stores and two of those department/pharmaceutical stores before I found the last one which just ended up betraying me unexpectedly. So, this time in a sense of greenness, economy and just plain laziness I ordered it from Amazon, where it, along with a new gasket for my pressure cooker came to $24.98,  two cents shy of the FREE shipping option, which if you look around at shipping charges is well worth the trouble.  This is where the envelopes come in . . . remember them?   The next time you find yourself just a few pennies shy of Free Shipping Option, I suggest you cruise over to OFFICE SUPPLIES and look at envelopes in reverse order of cost, there are quite a number for .98 cents, or 1.04, or some such nonsense amount where buying them for their own sake is suicidally stupid, as the shipping is like 700% the price of the envelope, but paying 1.09 for a few envelopes is a damn sight better than 7.95 for shipping. So there.

My weekend was both expectedly uneventful and filled with hideous carnage, all of which can be classified as non-profit.

There is a hoarding house cleanup going on and we agreed to take in about a dozen of these terrorized kitties into the Cat Sanctuary, so we cleaned the debris left by the previous occupants and replaced it with some heavy duty furnishings from my personal stash. This is where having a pick up truck comes in handy, however now that it’s leaking several different fluids it is getting harder and harder to maintain it for this sort of thing.

Sunday split right down the middle between cleaning a section of the Rail Trail for the benefit of a Boston Globe photographer – btw ..MY GOD IN 2D I LOOK AS BIG AS A HOUSE!…and being kidnapped for what turned out to be an endless meeting featuring demonstrations of products that are sold out of one’s living room. (not MY living room of course.)  I could have just stayed home and consumed my own cold pizza and warm soda while indulging in some DIY trepanation.

Spring when a woman’s fancy turns to cleaning.  The combination of Red Bull, Extra Strength Excedrin and Claritin may have gotten me through the week, but left me picking  up radio waves in my back teeth.  So I went a little wild with the new stash of chemicals.  A diet of Simple Green, Chlorox Cleanup and  Windex has gotten me through the last few days.  Come spring I throw open the windows, and start clearing out the bat cave. Above is just one of the boxes of stuff under my desk, some from my mother, some from my ersatz grandmother and some pieces are mine from a previous life. The hard part is getting rid of it all, I have donated and donated until I am down to three boxes of breakable memories, and have started offering them to my friends.  And before you ask, no, they aren’t really valuable enough to sell. The internet is flooded with other people’s mother’s stuff, for the 3 to 5 dollars they would net me, I’d rather have the cataloging time and the listing fees back, thank you very much.  I prefer making each item someone else’s problem.  Even if I have to pack em back into the basement in an unmarked box and make them the problems of my brother’s kids.

Some days i want to kill my cats, Some days i just want to kill one. George went walkabout as soon as the rain stopped the other day and didn’t come home.  this did not alarm me, he does this quite often in the good weather, he is especially fond of inviting himself into people’s homes and staying for supper. usually he is let back out where he wants to go and comes home when he feels like it.  this vagabonding behavior is one of the reasons he has not been offered for adoption, he is most certain to get killed by a coyote or a car in another location, if he doesn’t just Incredible Journey himself right back here. Most animal rescue outfits preach confinement for cats, however there are always the heretics and scoundrels.  I have this routine with Animal Control, whenever one of my outdoor guys has been missing for an uncomfortable period, usually over 36 hours, I call and leave a message; and as soon as I do that they magically appear. the ACO and I have been playing that game through 4 cats now.  This time I had faxed all the likely locations, placed an ad in print media and spent $15 dollars on laminated posters for the neighborhood, before I found him. He’d been rescued from a backyard about 9 blocks away and had been re-labeled ‘Louis’ and deposited in a cage at the MSPCA. Apparently his med records were wrong and he actually DOESN’T have a microchip under his skin. So that is definitely in his immediate future.  This time he was inside for 23 hours this time before the little bastard tore a cat size hole in the screen door and went outside to do his business.

I’m awake, and I don’t want to be. I spent the entire day either doing Census paperwork or cleaning.   I got my 1st census paycheck and went a little happy buying cleaning supplies, no one ever thinks to donate that kind of stuff and it’s not the kind of stuff you can skimp on. So, I had a few Red Bulls as a reward for all my hard work …and now I am awake.

And of course I have to be up extra early to hit a college campus- boo yah..hourly baby.  Restocked on shipping supplies and some back stock I even bought a couple of books. Now  I get to rol a die and figure out which bill gets paid…wait a minute perhaps i need one of those D&D 10 sided dies.

Tuesday I spent doing mostly Census stuff……and you thought I was just sitting around scooping cat litter…nope, the US GOV decided to give me another shot at counting humans in their natural habitat. Which incidentally caused my creditors to shudder with glee. And in the middle of the this dark crappy rainy day I get a call from a buddy who says, you gotta be at the river at 2:30 they are gonna restock the salmon….. which they shoot out of a hose from a truck into the river…or so they tell me, I sat down there for over an hour and no truck hence no fish, very underwhelming. Just three local media types, a cormorant, a couple of robins and several of the inebriated indigenous population waiting for a truck of fishlets that never arrived…why do I feel like were were in a Ionesco play and no one told me?

See, this is how I loose time. I spent Monday working as a vet tech the low cost spay neuter clinic and when I get home from that I am basically wiped and have to put my feet up. The most exciting thing that happened was that I had help shaving my cat….no no no……don’t go there…you dirty minded little buggers….Toby has a gene that gives him curly hair, which is cute when he was young, but sometimes he leans towards dreadlocks, so he gets shaved in the good weather. He’s quite good natured about it, and seems quite happy with his cool but embarrassing ‘do’.

They tell me the last few days have been beautiful outside…I wouldn’t know, the closest I get is when i take out the trash. Still plonking away at the pile of work i made for myself this winter. I never finished the wildlife/birding checklist for the wildlife sanctuary downtown, the charity cookbook is still incomplete, and I still need to make a label for donation cans and a brochure that i have been putting off for ages and ages…I’m such a lazy swine.

I even pulled out that box of books for sale that still need to be cataloged, you know the one under the desk with the newspapers piled ontop? yes that one. Some I will list, some i will sell straight out to other dealers, some i will just straight up donate because as we know most books are worthless. I used to have a good nose for books that were a good bet, I still do, but the universe is yielding up fewer and fewer of them to me. It hurts that I live in a pocket of deliberate ignorance. Hardly anyone within 20 miles buys a book that isn’t a best seller, hence rebuying them for resale is pointless, and anything that gets ‘donated’ is finding it’s way to the penny seller who feigns charity status. But even a blind pig finds a truffle now and then, and I still manage to come up with a decent book from time to time…still not enough to live on but enough so that I can write ‘bookseller’ on my city census with a straight face.