Baseball cards, love notes, pressed flowers, indecent photographs–and sometimes cash–have all drifted to me from the pages of old books. If you’re a book buyer you should always “fan” (either flip through with the thumb, or gently shake out) a book you’re considering for purchase before you put it down.
Every used bookstore I’ve worked in (or heard of) has a wall full of these curious treasures. Here’s mine:
Still on my first layer but it’s coming along. I will post new items as they find me. I’d love to see other people’s walls or hear stories about peculiar finds.
I thought I would start series of posts on equipment/software/office supplies that I find valuable in the bookselling trade. I love tools and will spend a fair amount on them if they make my life easier.
My first entry is fairly mundane but has saved me plenty of time and frustration.
Behold, the Desktop Packing Tape Dispenser!
Magnificent isn’t it? If you’ve tried tape guns or the tooth method to pack small-medium packages you know how frustrating it can be. You often crumple and throw away as much tape as actually makes it on the box. The DTPD solves that problem. It has a double spool that can either hold 2 different standard rolls of tape or 1 roll of packing tape. The dispenser has some heft and a rubber non-skid bottom so–depending on the thickness of tape used–you can generally operate it with one hand. I also use clear packing tape to attach my address labels and my meter-printed postage. This is much cheaper than using peel-off, adhesive labels and the DTPD is perfect for tearing off short 2-3″ pieces of tape.
I haven’t been able to find these in the chain office supply stores but you can generally find them on eBay for 12-20$
The only caveat/warning I offer is that the cutting edge is long, quite sharp, and won’t give if you’re not looking and swing your hand down on it.
I just took a time out from staring at my computer screen and went out to stare at a movie screen. Saw 28 Weeks later. I liked it better than the first film (which I thought was too derivative of Romero’s Day of the Dead). 28 Weeks Later is set in a crumbling Iraq-style Green Zone–just outside London–and steeped in security-state paranoia. Like the zombies in the film who travel at a dead run, it doesn’t waste any time in descending into a chaotic, viral nightmare.
The zombies are infected with a disease dubbed “the Rage virus” which turns the hosts into hyper-adrenalized, vectors who blast body fluids in every direction. Eventually all of mainland Britain is infected and the hosts die of starvation (and, presumably, exhaustion). The film has a number of excusable plot holes (How come one zombie can use a key card?) and I caught myself thinking, “Why would a virus evolve that would burn through all of its resources and kill its host so quickly?” But then I was like “Hey, look who’s talking”.
The thing I miss most in the new breed of hyper-active walking dead movies are the moments right after a likeable character has been bit. They know they’re f**ked but they have a couple of days think about it as their limbs turn blue.
Zombie films usually have a strong anti-government, Libertarian streak. They offer a fantasy world where complete, selfish self-reliance is justified (Though I’m not a Libertarian, I am a curmudgeon, so I’ve seen every zombie film that has staggered onto video). 28 Weeks plays with this tendency, there are serious consequences for “going it alone” (yet another Iraq parallel) but I need to see it again (when I know where all the gotchas are coming) before I get a handle on its political discourse. I wish all political discourse was dramatized with walking corpses…oh yeah, it is.
I read something about ticks once that completely terrified me. They wait in trees–inert, hibernating–until something warm walks underneath; immediately they boot-up and drop into the warmth. I wanna see zombies like that.
Lately my specialty has been sex / sleaze paperbacks from the 50s and 60s. They’re great fun and they are sought out by a variety of collectors. Some purchase them for the camp value, many collect the famous writers who churned these out under pseudonyms, plus the covers are excellent examples of poverty row graphic design.
Robert Silverberg (as Don Elliott, Loren Beauchamp), Donald Westlake, and Lawrence Block (both as Andrew Shaw) seem to have produced hundreds of these on their own. Harlan Ellison also did a few; Gore Vidal and many more.
Paperbacks from this period were some of the first to address gay themes and other taboo subjects. While they were almost never positive or approving of alternative lifestyles they were at least portraying gay and lesbian characters and helping to create and support a subculture.
I have read a few of these that caught my eye. Mostly the ones set in New York City, written in hipster slang. They aren’t necessarily high art, but because the writers didn’t have their name on the book, and they had to turn them around quickly to make a decent buck, they are remarkably free and spontaneous. This was the passage that caught me from Sin Hipster by Don Holliday:
“There is nothing on Earth so abominable as three drunken sailors staggering through Greenwich Village, whistling at girls, talking loudly, their ridiculous hats tipped far forward and their necks strained backward so they can see despite the hats; pretending they are worldly men of the sea…One sailor alone might be all right, might know a little something. And two sailors, well, perhaps they are good friends and are looking for something together. But three sailors….what can one say? Hence three white suited abominations swagger through the streets. Something, somewhere must be wrong with the navy.”
This novel also feature a bitter bookstore clerk (is there any other kind?) with a nymphomaniac girlfriend nicknamed Mechanical Annie, endless parties, and sex scenes that are more imaginative than the usual (which tend to be of the “my hand moved ever lower across the smooth white mounds of her buttocks” variety). Highly recommended.
There are many resources if one wants to start a collection of these books. Strange Sisters is a cover gallery of lesbian themed paperbacks, Paperback Parade is a bi-monthly print zine that publishes carefully compiled lists of collectible titles plus interviews with authors, artists and publishers from the golden age of paperback publishing.
Enjoy! Just don’t blame me if you get all Sin Sick and join the Lust Lost.
Still on my first layer but it’s coming along. I will post new items as they find me. I’d love to see other people’s walls or hear stories about peculiar finds.
Hang Fire Books 