Two weeks to go and NO books entered again today :(

I was hoping to get the blog entry to identify the different books with their correct prices....see this:


but so far haven't had a long enough time at any one point in a day to get that done properly.


Today is a bust. Between previously scheduled (and important) appointments, errands and the baseball game which is an hour out of town (and we have an hour practice ahead of time so we leave home at 4:00 and might not get back until 9:00pm tonight...), well, there's no time to do that particular blog entry today either.

And I'm sending out my e-mail newsletter today, which takes more time than one would think -- so no chance to get data entry done.

Did I tell you that I have another book fair coming up in TWO WEEKS?

Yup, the Gold Rush Book Fair in Grass Valley, CA. See here:  is exactly two weeks and one day away & I haven't even packed ONE SINGLE box.

Normally, by this time in the game, I'd be about half packed and have the book cases down, or at least partially down.

Nay, Nay... not this time. I've been having further issues with my asthma, and also trying to work around two sets of baseball practice times and scouts, it's been hectic and not very conducive to packing or even thinking about packing.

So this coming week, I have to put the pedal to the metal (I love metaphores!) and get my boxes packed, the van ready and the bookcases somewhere near ready to go.

I also rummaged through the boxes, and boxes, and boxes of books I still have not listed (and found new stock)  - coming up with approximately ten boxes of unprocessed books that I wanted to have entered and ready to go.

As per usual, however I've been able to get one, two, or at best seven books entered per day this last week.  Mostly because the books I'm working on this week are all older books that have some intriguing aspects about them and I want to research them before I list them. Well, researching these books has taken FAR more time than I expected.  This is good in its own way, but dreadful in relation to getting the number of books processed that I want to get done.

Humphf.... same old song, twenty-fifth verse....  it's starting to sound like I'm a slacker.

Oh, well.  I can do what I can do, and not do what I can't do at the moment.

How's that for namby-pamby philosophical mumblings for the day?

And now, since I'm rambling, I think I'll end this.

Enjoy!

We have a WINNER!!!

Thanks to the generous nature of book dealers -- and their passion to find all sorts of trivial, wonderful information....

it looks as if we (they've) found the dust jacket illustrator for this book.  It appears to be Charles L. Wrenn.

Now, interestingly, in the search, one of the dealers found not one but TWO different dust jacket illustrations for Grosset & Dunlap -- the one seen above would appear to be from approximately 1923-24.

There was a second Grosset & Dunlap edition published sometime in 1924 to coincide with the photoplay (movie) which was based on the book, featuring George O'Brien, Cleo Madison, Billie Dove and Harry Morey. I've seen one picture of the dust jacket on the ERB website here.  But I can't (so far) find information about the book and there don't appear to be any available online currently.  I'll do more checking as I can.

So we have a winner.  Thanks go to Gentleman Jim Arner, the gunslinger who can outdraw (and reference) with the best of them.

Thanks again GJim!

Any guesses who the dust jacket artist is?

From what I CAN see of the signature on the bottom edge of the front dust jacket cover, the first name is Charles (or ch something). The last name starts with a W.  After that.... well, I can't tell.

Any guesses?

Old books vs GOOD old books

Back in the days when I was working in an open shop, many a time would I greet a customer bringing in books and then have the customer - so excited - tell me that they had some OLD books to sell and they had to be worth lots of money.

After all -- they were OLD.  Antique. Rare.

And I, being the one to delve into the boxes of books (many of which had never been cleaned, dusted or checked for bugs before being dropped into the box), would pull the books out and have the pleasure (not) of telling this excited customer that his / her books were not all that rare or uncommon, or ... unfortunately, worth much at all.

I hated being the bad guy.

But, then again, it was an opportunity to begin the process of education regarding the history of books (very brief and very much cursory).

The Crack of Doom by Hugh Edwards - 1934 - First American Edition

So what is it that makes one book more valuable than another?  Huh - that could take volumes to answer.
The quick and dirty answer is two-fold (well, actually, more folded than that):

1.) The book HAS to be desired.  If no one is looking for the book, then who cares? No price in the world (high, or low) will induce a buyer to something if it isn't wanted.

2.) rarity: IE: how many copies of the book are available?   If there are only 10 copies known to exist of Edgar Allan Poe's first published book (Tamerlane) and people eagerly collect all of Edgar Allan Poe's works, then this book will have some real value based on the difficulty in obtaining a copy.

3.) See -- more folds unfold.  Condition. Condition counts for a HUGE amount of the value of a collectable book. A book in perfect, as new condition (even if it's 300 years old) will have a higher price than a 300 year old, duct-taped, pages missing, crayoned-in, fire singed copy.  Age here, isn't the biggest factor.  In fact, age is rarely a factor in the book world until you get Wayyyy back into the 1400's (at least for material from the New World - don't even ask me about books, etc from the Orient).

The Mysterious Stranger by Mark Twain (illustrated by N. C. Wyeth)

1924 printing (originally published 1916)

The pictures throughout this blog entry are all around the same time period (well, within a 35 year period, lets go with that). So all of them are pretty equal when it comes to age. But these books are NOT all equal.

Forbidden Wine by Frederic Arnold Kummer - 1931 - First Edition

Why is it, then, that they are not equal?

Again, desirability first.


Oh, here's another:

4.) Something special about the book that makes it more desirable. IE: illustrator, subject matter, binding (in the case of find bindings), etc.

Arizona by Clarence Budington Kelland - c1940

Grosset & Dunlap reprint with stills from the Columbia Pictures Movie Extravaganza

Blazing Guns on the Chisholm Trail by Borden Chase - 1948

First Edition with the rarely seen dust jacket.

One of the books pictured here is priced at $3,000.00.  The others range in price from $30.00 to $150.00

The difference in price has to do with scarcity, edition, condition and desirabilty.

In my next post I'll try and give a bit of information about each of these books and explain the differences in price. 

In the mean time, make your own guesses :  the prices (in no particular order) for the books are: $30.00, $30.00, $100.00, $150.00 and $3,000.00.

I'd love to hear some guesses.

A Rogue, a Ruffian, a Cad and a Wastrel....

How many different words are there for a BAD man? 

I don't know exactly, but no matter how many, most (if not all) of them would fit handily on the man known as Harry Flashman. 

Harry Flashman was, originally, a creation of Thomas Hughes in his much-beloved novel of English boyhood Tom Brown's Schooldays. The novel, published in 1857, related the adventures of one Tom Brown as he went off to public school (IE: British PRIVATE school - in this case, Rugby School which is Warwickshire, England). Tom's adventures centered around the school, its masters (teachers) and both friends and enemies. The most obnoxious of these enemies was Harry Flashman. Flashman was a cad and a bully of enormous magnitude who finally received his comeuppance by being expelled from Rubgy for drunkenness.

Though Thomas Hughes did write a follow-up novel to Tom Brown's Schooldays, Tom Brown at Oxford, the cad Flashman was never seen again....

Until George MacDonald Fraser decided to resurrect him in -- in a series of adventures which were purportedly "Found"  in 1965 thusly from the explanatory note:

"The great mass of manuscript known as the Flashman Papers was discovered during a sale of household furniture at Ashby, Leicestershire, in 1965. The papers were subsequently claimed by Mr. Paget Morrison, of Durban, South Africa, the nearest known living relative of their author. A point of major literary interest about the papers is that they clearly identify Flashman, the school bully of Thomas Hughes' Tom Brown's Schooldays, with the celebrated Victorian soldier of the same name. The papers are, in fact, Harry Flashman's personal memoirs from the day of his expulsion from Rugby School in the late 1830's to the early years of the present century., 1905, when he must have been over eighty."

From the front jacket blurb, the reader received a much flashier introduction:

"This is the story of a classic blackguard who enjoyed villainy for its own sake. Shameless, exicting, funny, Flashman's deplorable odyssey is studded with such great figures as Wellington, Queen Victoria, Dr. Arnold Cardigan, and Akbar Khan, observed with the cynical eye of a scoundrel who was honest only in reporting what he saw."

The series consists of twelve books (if you count only those strictly about Harry Flashman himself), the last published in 2005. Sadly, author George MacDonald Fraser (OBE) died in 2008, ending the raucous series.

The dust jacket art for this series of books was created from 1969-1994  by A. E. Barbosa, an Englishman of Portuguese ancestry (his father was a vice-consul), he lived the life of an upper-class Englishman (he referred to himself as Barbosa and only used the Anglicanized version of his first name Arturo - Arthur.)

He illustrated all of the Flashman books through 1994 and before that, he illustrated books by Georgette Heyer. His artwork for both Fraser and Heyer was exceptional, and human figures were similarly tall and thin, but the colors he used for Georgette Heyer's work was much more muted and subtle, while Flashman and his ilk received darker, richer and more exotic coloring and scenery.

Flashman books are not only still available, they are actively collected and read -- both for their historical accuracy and dashing military adventures, as well as for their raunchy, bad-boy protagonist Flashman, that irrepressible CAD (I LOVE that word) of a man who didn't say no to any sort of trouble.

What a week .... and it's only Wednesday!

SO....

I thought I'd be able to get back to posting blog entries on a (mostly) daily basis this week. After all, most of the tough, gotta-get-done stuff is done....at least, I keep telling myself that.

But...


I guess not.

First off, I meant to post this picture yesterday.  The Arrow of Light ceremony for my two Webelos Twos went off better than I expected (I wasn't really expecting it to go well at all, so I'm wildly happy with the results).

In order to GET to this point, however, I've gone through a near nervous breakdown. Party organization is NOT my thing.  I can do it, but I don't really do it well. I FORGET things -- or forget them until it's too late to do them WELL.

Case in point, I realized at 2:00 in the morning the day before the ceremony that we had drinks to go with the cake, that we had food (by the way, it was GOOD food too), but we didn't have drinks to go with the food. I had to scramble to get some drink stuff figured out.  (Guess what - people mostly don't drink their coffee black... how was I to know?  I don't even drink coffee.)
Sigh.

Did you know tapered candles are getting harder to find? And they don't come in many colors? Did you? Huh, huh?

I didn't: that is, until I had to go to three stores and ASK questions.


The candles were a symbol of everything that I faced with this party.  Everything got done. But it wasn't easy. And many of the details had to be tweaked... and on short notice.  Don't even ASK about the plaques the boys are holding. DON'T ASK, cause the answer will make your brain explode (or, more likely, my brain will explode).

In the end, it  went well and I can take this as a trial run for next year's event when I get to bridge up six boys (including Number Two Son).


I survived. The party went well and it's all done and over for this year. Not too shabby.

A Rhinoceros" Preposterous!

Once I found out about Ed Emberley (author and mostly known as an Illustrator) -- I was hooked.

First off, Emberley has done a series of books over the years helping non-artistic kids (like ME)learn and hopefully understand the basics of drawing / art in a full, friendly, and non-technical,  look-down-on-kids way.  His sub-series of books about making things out of thumbprints is, if you ask me, brilliant. THIS I can do.  Ask me to draw in three dimensions with perspective..... not on your life...but take an ink-stamped thumbprint and add squiggles, lines, curves, etc.  THAT'S right up my alley.

  See - pigs, cats, dogs, cars... all out of thumbprints.

Here's another of the basic books.

Then he gets specific (yeah, I know I need a better picture of this...sue me.)

And one I picked up with my sons in mind... not that THEY ever took a moment to look inside. Sigh.

But, I remind myself, all things come in their own time.  Number One Son is reading again (Garth Nix, no less) and ENJOYING IT!!!   And Number Two Son has found the kitchen science book I put on his book shelf more than two years ago. (Now I have to stock up on Vinegar, baking Soda, food coloring and other fun Science / Food items.)

The topmost book is one that I just entered into my database yesterday. Written by Letta Schatz and illustrated by Emberley, this is the story of a young boy who doesn't DO the normal pet thing.... no he doesn't.

"I don't think my parents understand about pets. I asked for pets, and I begged for pets, and I PESTERED for pets until at last they gave in. And what did they get me?  Goldfish and guppies! I'd never choose pets like that - not with the world full of wonderful animals! If I could pick my pets, I'd get..." This particular book was written in 1965 and is not often seen anymore, especially with a dust jacket.

Great book. Great illustrations. And most importantly, great pets. 

Ed Emberley didn't just stop with how-to books. No, this prolific illustrator has illustrated numerous books over the years and received awards for several - Most famous, I think, was is the Caldecott Winner Drummer Hoff which he illustrated and was re-interpreted by his wife Barbara. He also was a Caldecott honor recipient for One Wide River  to Cross which is a version of Noah and the Ark.  For more about Emberley and his work, see- this.

(When I was a kid, my mother ended up with all sorts of wonderful pets in our house: guinea pigs, rats, mice, gerbils, cats, hamsters (nasty, bite-y things though they are) , an Easter rabbit that ended up as dinner a couple of months later :( , one poor, sad runt of a dog that should never have been left alive, etc.)

No ferrets though, nor creepy crawly things like snakes (probably more because I was a wimp about them than for any other reason).

And now, when my sons ask for non-traditional pets.... well, I have the excuse that the cats we have are darned good hunters. Sorry, no mice or rats for snacking on this week. Darn.

Next up for data entry this week:

Rumford Complete Cook Book (1918)

My Poetry Book : An Anthology of Modern Verse for Boys and Girls (illustrated by Willy Pogany)

The Children of Odin (illustrated with wonderful full color plates by Willy Pogany)

and a 1st edition of Ishi in Two Worlds by Theodora Kroeber (who happens to be the mother of Ursula K. Le Guin -- did you know that, did you?  Be honest.... bet you didn't.)

And for the rest of the week, I may or may not get time to do any posts, OR data entry.... the baseball tournament which jump starts the season begins tonight and continues tomorrow and at least one game on Saturday - with the possibility of two games if they do well enough.  I'm looking forward to see how well Number One Son's team does. Number Two Son will have to wait until next year for the tournament, as it's for twelve year olds and older. 

Also, the Arrow of Light Ceremony for my Webelos twos is on Monday night... I have another arrow to make, candles to find, the cake is ordered, the food is ordered, the stuff is almost ready to go, but I've got LOADS of errands and THINGS to do before Monday night.