Monday, October 25, 2010

A Hail Mary at the Auction



Uh-oh. The book gods may have smiled prematurely. I'm not complaining, but I am sort of superstitious about acquisition. As I've said before, experience has proven that if  I get lucky  it will be awhile before it happens again. The thing is, we planned a book buying road trip in November with rather high overhead, so of course I'm counting on it being productive  -- and now this happened. "This" is an auction we went to on Saturday. All I can say is, if life were a football game this one would be a Hail Mary pass!

We went with reasonable expectations, as the books' owner had spent her life in a bibliophilic occupation. The ad had touted  hundreds of titles and there were  indeed  that many. They were good books too, just not collectible books. The occasional title did pop out, but not frequently enough to make my heart race. Had I been there alone I probably wouldn't have registered for a number due to the lengthy wait while furniture, glass, silverplate, and framed prints made their arduous way to the block. But Eric needs large numbers of history titles for store stock and is depleted now due to the summer shows and a large event at the store a couple weeks ago. So we stayed, him all jazzed up and me in a sort of auction stupor.

When it finally came time to bid on the books he did so aggressively and won virtually all of them upstairs where the majority had been stored. There were also a few in the dry basement, but I'd  seen nothing of interest, so trooped down  behind the horde with about as much excitement as I would feel on my way to a root canal. But passing through the living room I spotted a built-in niche that had been formerly hidden by the line of people waiting for  numbers. Since Eric was already downstairs and I had no interest in waiting for doll furniture to be auctioned I figured I might as well  take a look.   

Wowza! All Ohioana, all wonderful and most signed. I knew of three dealers there, one of whom told me he'd been in the business since the 70's, so I figured if I got them I was going to have dig deep. I went downstairs, whispered my news to Eric and waited while he bought six or seven more shelves of books. Finally that done, the auctioneer lead the way to my little stash in the wall. Most people hadn't seen it for the same reason I hadn't, so enough of a buzz ensued that the auctioneer paused long enough to give everyone a look.

"Nothing good here," the experienced dealer said finally. The others mumbled agreement.

Whaaaaaat? I had sold some of these books in the recent past, so I knew I was right about them  In fact I was so certain that I actually turned  around and looked at the dealer who'd made the pronouncement. But if shock showed on my face it didn't change a thing.You are not going to believe this -- I still cannot believe it myself -- but I got it ALL for $10, less than Eric paid for every shelf he bought. All I can say is, if you don't believe in the book gods, you might want to rethink it.

The big problem was that we now owned more books than could be transported in our PT Cruiser which is normally a bookseller's dream car for storage. So we made arrangements to go back to the store for the truck. But by the time we returned they announced that dealers had a half hour to remove their purchases, or would have to wait until Tuesday. We kicked into overdrive -- me packing and Eric hauling the boxes down the stairs to the curb where he lined them up and then went to fetch the car which was on a side street, but still  in sight. Twenty minutes later he trudged back upstairs  for more books wearing a face like a thundercloud. Two large lidded plastic bins filled to the brim had been stolen from the curb.The good news is I had hand carried the stuff from the living room at the start, so it was safely stashed.

As it turned out, we did not have time to get all the books out, so will return tomorrow. Hopefully, they will still be there. One of the auction workers heard us talking about the theft and said it's becoming a big problem these days. Apparently nefarious behavior isn't confined to library sales. Sad though it is, I'm not going to dwell on it because I feel very fortunate to be so bookishly blessed in a such an odd way. In addition to the local stuff, I pulled out maybe fifteen other great books from Eric's buys, including a signed Gwendolyn Brooks. ( see photo above for a mixed sampling )

But there IS still the expensive road trip to consider after all.. Which means that  I'm currently engaged in tense negotiations with the book gods,  hoping fervently to strike a deal.  If they will just grant my wish on the upcoming trip I swear I will not ask for another thing.

At least until the next time.

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