At Last to List!

It’s dark and cold today and I am happy as a clam, though why clams are happy is anybody’s guess. Today I am FINALLY going to hunker down with the new books from the auction, plus the new ones I bought yesterday at the estate sale, and do some serious listing. I did add maybe ten on Thursday, but they were fairly easy, as some of them I already had in my database, so I needed only to change the description and was good to go.  The coffee’s on, my favorite mug with the green pear is washed, Eric left for the store, and even my typing is better than usual. All systems shout GO!

Speaking of the estate sale though, it ended up being quite novel and fun. I admit that I can be easily amused, but you have to picture this, as it’s not a common occurrence for these things to be quite so convivial. We got there three hours ahead of start time – well, minus maybe ten minutes as Eric had trouble extricating himself from the store. There’s a strange law about stores. They can be quiet as King Tut’s tomb, but as soon as you need to be somewhere people emerge from the woodwork waving fistfuls of money. By the time we finally got to Akron a long line of cars lined the main street AND a side street. But it was okay to be numbers 28 and 29, as the house was big and the atmosphere that of a party. This was due to the fact that if the goods are worthy this particular estate sale company rewards its potential buyers. In this instance they had set up several contained fires to take  the chill out of  the air, plus a buffet table festooned with a big pot of hot chocolate, as well as  muffins and cookies displayed on pretty trays lined with paper autumn leaves.  The sight of it unleashed a tremendous amount of good will.

Also, Andrea, who is one of my favorite booksellers ,showed up, as did Darwin, an antiques dealer and expert on American quilts . I met Darwin back in the 70‘s when he was a big deal in the art world for elevating the Amish quilt to folk art status. I wrote numerous articles about him – one for the Akron Beacon Journal magazine and several others for various antiques publications – so it’s always fun to reconnect. He and I are both trying to use technology to promote our blogs and neither one of us is  very good at it, so we laugh about it a lot which is really about all you can do other than buy a Dummies book on the topic, which I did, but  I hate reading it so ....

Anyway, the sale abounded with gorgeous high end antiques -- furniture, silver, glass, china, art, huge wall maps, and a travelling dresser set in a heavy wooden case so beautiful you’d lug the thing on your back even if you were off to visit an ashram in Calcutta. Oddly, the condition of most the books fell far below the condition of the other stuff, but I still managed to gather up some nice goodies, including beautiful issues of Frank Leslie’s weekly paper from the 1880’s, three very good gun books (one in particular), a limited edition book on illuminated manuscripts, and a very nice 1871 copy of  The Soldier’s Story of His Captivity at Anderson, Belle Isle, and Other Rebel Prisons by Warren Lee Goss. I also bought several old auction catalogs, a  gun catalog  from the 1920's, and Lathrop C. Harper's 214th catalog.

Lathrop C. Harper was a rock star bookseller back in the day, so this one almost required smelling salts. Of course it wasn’t  a catalog produced by Harper himself – had that been the case I'd have been knocked out cold. But even though the 214th catalog came from the business which retained Lathrop Harper's name, it's still a beautiful thing and I think he'd have given it two thumbs up. We'll have to talk about Lathrop Harper sometime, as I have one very cool thing of his that would be fun to share.

So there you have it --  the report from the field. But now it’s time for me to fire up the camera, select a nice stack of books to list and get at it. The sun came out while I was writing this, which is a darn shame, not because I wish I were outside doing something else, but because listing and writing, both things I love, are enhanced by overcast skies and freezing temperatures. 

One out of two will have to do.