Down I Go

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Down I Go (Popular Library 653) 1955 AUTHOR: Ben Kerr (aka: William Ard) ARTIST: Rafael de Soto, originally uploaded by Hang Fire Books.

Numerous scans added to the pulp fiction gallery. This one is in my top ten, easy. Love the postures, the flesh tone, the broken chair, stubbed-out cigarettes, and the carelessly discarded shoe. I’ll definitely watch for more de Soto covers.

Femme Fatale Bookplate & W. J. Lugsdin Ad

Just found a couple of nice ephemera items. First this noirish bookplate belonging to “Ruth Parsons, anno 1944”.

Click for larger version. It’s looks better than it reproduces (my scanner isn’t playing well with the printing dots).

And this ad card from W. J. Lugsdin Hats, Caps and Furs, 259 Yonge St. Toronto (Opposite Trinity Square)

Nice color, charming vintage bathing costumes and peeping toms. On the reverse is penciled “Ellsworth Rishel, Toronto, Ont, Canada”

I’m not finding anything about the business but here’s an image of Yonge Street from around the period of the card.

Our Stoop Sale

So we had the first of our pre-move stoop sales this past weekend and–being a bit of a connoisseur–I thought I’d post some images and talk about what I think makes for an attractive sale.

First off, you need a good sidewalk profile that shows from at least a block away. Pursuant to this we teamed up with 2 other households for volume (and company).

Use as much of the sidewalk as you–semi-legally–can but try not to inconvenience your neighbors as they can be your best customers.

You should mill about during your sale. Merchandise and rearrange your stuff as items sell. Another benefit of staying mobile is that you look like a shopper, and shoppers attract more shoppers.

Mix up your of display areas. Use hangers/clotheslines, boxes and tables. Go both high and low. You want accessibility…but mystery.


Make yourself comfortable. Play music (especially if you have stereo equipment to demo). Have donuts and/or pizza and be prepared to stay a while. Ideally a stoop sale should go for 6 hrs or so (unless you run out of stuff) I recommend 10-4, then pack-up slowly and keep selling.

Plus a few more Flickr images.

I’ve been doing this for a long time. My hometown hosts The World’s Largest Garage Sale every fall and I’ve learned to “read” sales very quickly (because it’s extremely uncomfortable to walk into someone’s yard/garage/stoop/driveway and then awkwardly turn around because there’s nothing to look at.).

Here are a few signs–that can be seen from a safe distance–that would cause me to give a sale the pass.

  • Pink plastic seen from 20 yards: Toddler syndrome. The parents probably cleaned out the good stuff before the baby was born and they haven’t spent money on anything but the baby since.
  • Warped particle board shelving: Probable lack of disposable income and/or taste. Also implies careless or damp storage conditions.
  • More than 1 square foot of table space devoted to china figurines
  • Specialized display racks/tubs: Probably a “professional” seller with newish, overpriced (yet cheaply made) crap
  • Country Crafts: This might be my issue. I lost out on “most artistic” in my high school yearbook to a dude who painted Bob Ross landscapes on sawblades. I can’t let it go.
  • A recurring sale (especially during a weekday)

That’s all I can think of for now. Anyone else have any stoop sale dealbreakers?

Movie Break: Rob Zombie’s Halloween

I just came back from seeing Rob Zombie’s Halloween. It was packed with in-joke cameos and visual references to classic horror films of the 70s and 80s. Definite comfort food for a lad who meticulously applied fake blood to his hockey mask for three Halloweens running.

The first 30-minutes of the film are devoted to mapping out Michael Myers’ psychosis; his stripper mom and sexually precocious older sister (for his homicidal sexual repression), his lazy abusive step-dad, his cruelty to animals, and his dependence on masks. All in all, a neatly worked-out background for a character who was never more than a “Shape”.

The autumn setting is nice too. Lots of blood is spilled over crackly golden maple leaves. And the shout-out to Suspiria–with the main girl crawling though a claustrophobic maze of irrational interior spaces–is a lot of fun.

The innovation of the original Halloween though was that it was one of the first horror films to show bottomless evil rising from the suburbs (Myers was a direct descendant of The Bad Seed). Unfortunately Rob Zombie can’t do tract housing, only trailer parks. All the teen-age characters swear like sailors, the head cheerleader and her clique are dating implausible scruffy hair-bags, and the family dialog was cribbed from the Jerry Springer Show. So the suburban milieu is kind of wasted.

My Hunting Grounds

The New York Times recently ran an article on stoop sale culture in Brooklyn.

It focuses on the tension between friendly “old-fashioned stoop sellers” and the “aggressive”, “vulture” dealers “who are often not from the neighborhood.”

It hits a lot of my buttons. First off, if there were no “vultures” most sellers would end lugging most of their crap back down into the basement or leaving it by the curb (plus the plains would reek from the rotting carcases of dead buffalo).

Secondly: “With eBay, anyone can be a dealer” (the article quotes an indignant stoopsaler). Sure it’s easy to do a basic listing on eBay, but it takes work to do it right. Item research, presentation, and copy-writing are skills that most people do not have. I snipe half-assed eBay listings all the time and I frequently pay less than I would have for the same item at a stoop sale.

Thirdly: Just because a seller finds some outlier auction that ended at $50, does not mean they can print the page and use it as a price tag on their chipped/faded/disintegrating piece of crap. eBay shoppers pay a premium to browse from their desk and have an item shipped to their door. If you aren’t offering that service, you can’t expect the premium.

Okay, vent concluded. This Sunday I’ll be on the other side of the stoop. We’re having the first of a couple of sales in preparation for a move. I’ll post the Craigslist ad when it goes up.

Glenn Danzig’s Library

That book isn’t in the stacks right now sir. Would you like to fill out a call slip and retrieve it….from HELL!? LidiLidiLidiLidiLidiLidiKerangKerangSKRONK! (Damnation-tempting guitar solo)

As long as a bad-ass image requires forbidden tomes–to match six-pack abs and demon tattoos–there will be a place for the humble bookseller.

….I gotta play Guitar Hero now.

Link via Paper Cuts (A New York Times Book Blog).

That Woman is Lost to Shame

Found these ads for Sapolio and Vitalized Phos-Phites in the rear of Bulwer Lytton’s Last Days of Pompeii (The Caxton Edition, 1884). Click on image for larger version.

They really had the shame/ostracizing pitch down pat in those days….and I think “Vitalized Phos-phite” is the same substance–“Nerve giving principles of the ox brain and the embryo of wheat and oat”–they give to cows to make mad cows. “I have not had a severe headache since I began its use.”…”Thanks to all the heathful and invigorating holes in my brain.”