Money . . . as usual

Even though I’ve worked a lot of overtime in the last couple of weeks (in governmental terms, that is—not horribly long if you’re a dot-com survivor), it’s getting harder to keep the bills current.  And just forget about trying to find any capital to try cranking Waring Stuph up again properly.  Still, hope springs eternal, and the other night I was talking with a woman at a neighborhood association meeting who also sells on eBay.  She told me that she’d just got through auctioning off one copy each of Berke Breathed’s two Academia Waltz cartoon collections.  (Breathed drew the Waltz while he was a student at the University of Texas in the late 1970s.)  This got my attention, because I happen to have copies of those two books, which I picked up years ago—one at a book show, and the other at the local Half Price Books.  I asked her what she’d got for them, and when she told me $225 each, I damn near dropped my drink.  At that kind of price, I can sure be separated from my copies, because while I think they are indeed cool, and they remind me of a nice thing about my time in college, I ain’t got $450 worth of sentimental attachment to them, and I’ve only got about $45 actual investment in them.

So I came home and scourged myself to write some recyclable text, and put them out for bid, with the idea that the proceeds could go into Waring Stuph’s Meant-For-Buying-Inventory account.  As of tonight the first collection is at $100, which means it broke reserve and will sell, while the second is stuck at $65 and might conceivably not—although I bet it gets sniped.  Anyone who wants to find out what the fuss is about (including my description of why the books are significant, and why they will never, ever be reprinted), can look at the first one or the second one.  Bids close at a little after 6:00 PM PDT/9:00 PM EDT tomorrow (Friday).  Stop back by and see what they sold for; I’m kinda interested in knowing, myself.

(What I oughta do is to dig out the ’toons I cut out of The Daily Texan very long ago and saved in a file folder, scan ’em, and put ’em on CD, because I got a bunch in the folder that didn’t make it to the anthologies.)

Sir Lancelot was boggled by John Carter’s Barsoomian saber in the editorial department.  Fnord.