Hanging On to the Boards!

This has been one strange week. Rarely do I find myself gone for days at a stretch with no time for listing, photographing, facebooking and twittering. I don’t miss the last two, but if I don’t get back to work today on the first two occupations my sales are going to dry up like a creek in a draught. So instead of cleaning my house, which I should also do, I will be cranking out listings from now until six p.m. when the store closes. The sad part is Wednesday’s auction provided precious little new stuff, most of which is languishing in the SBB, and yesterday’s estate sale provided even less. Make that none.

We hit the road for Aurora at seven a.m. yesterday, not because the sale sounded so fabulous, but because it was the only game in town, except of course it wasn’t even close to being in town! It took an hour to get there and the “lots of books” advertised in the paper turned out to be “some” books, none of which proved worthy of their $5 a book price tag. We’re talking Danielle Steele here – and I mean that literally. This particular estate sale company used to be good, but I haven’t bought a single book from them in a whole year and it’s not because I haven’t gone to their sales. What’s interesting is that the house was a contemporary glass and marble palace and yet we’ve hauled better books out of inner city row houses. On the positive side we did get one great thing for the upcoming Akron Antiquarian Book and Paper Show.

I sold paper at this show last year, but for the first time NOBS has extended an invitation to ephemera dealers, so this year the competition will swell faster than a sprained ankle. I’ve noticed even at the mall that boxes of plastic-bagged items, even when there is adequate space to flip through them, do not attract buyers like items laid flat or hung on the wall. I had been envisioning some sort of bulletin board apparatus that would stand up against the back of the tables where items could be tacked up for high visibility. We’ve been mulling over such a thing for weeks now and what do we find in the basement of this house – not one, but TWO, folding boards exactly like I had in mind. And get this – the price was $10 for both! So it could be argued that the trip and the many hours lost were not in vain after all, especially since I can use one at the mall after the show. We’ll have to remove the legs and find a way to anchor them to the tables, but Eric is very crafty at things like that. So I’m not going to give it another thought except in terms of what items will grace them.

My dearth of books, however, is becoming serious. I cannot believe that after all these years we hold so little inventory. I bought huge collections – and in the case of the infamous Elmer, a MASSIVE collection -- and yet have little left to show from them. Of course partly that’s because I maintain around a thousand books at the mall, but even so, most of what I got from these big buys has been sold. All through the fall we were book sale junkies, including that trip to Dayton, and yet here I am still singing the bookless blues. Yesterday I even hit ebay again and scoured the joint for bargains. Several hundred listings later I finally found a good one on auction, locked in my highest price, and never looked at it again. So I was rather surprised when I saw I’d won. The opening bid was $10 and I got it for $20 including shipping, so it wasn’t too terrible, but I’d still have liked $10 a whole lot better. As nice as it is, it's also just ONE book and I spent way too much time acquiring it.

Well, here’s a weird thing! I went out to the garage just now and dragged in one of those folding displays upon which I planned to tack up some bags of ephemera to give you an idea of what it will look like at the show. But I opened it up only to find that it already contained a display. And not just any display either. This is a high school science project about Lodi Park in the Mississippian Period. I ran and got Eric who went nuts over it and tried to get me to let him have the whole shebang for his store which is located in – ta-da! -- Lodi. But nothing doing. The display is mounted on brown paper stapled to the boards, so he can remove the staples and take the display along to the museum where his customers can peruse information about the exposed sedimentary rock cliff until the next millennium.

But for now at least that board is MINE!