Rare, Collectible, & Otherwise

Category: Blog (Page 148 of 153)

Treasure in them thar boxes!

You may have heard that the traveling Antiques Roadshow program on PBS discovered its most valuable treasure to date during its stop in Tulsa. Surprising, to most everybody, was the collection of Chinese-carved rhinoceros horn cups valued at one to one-point-five million dollars.

As appraiser Lark Mason noted, “You never know what is going to turn up.”

How true that is.

While not on the scale of the horn-cups in value, a rarely seen book is currently resting in the inventory at McHuston Booksellers.

The volume has had a bit of abuse in its lifetime, but copies of the 1932 first edition of “The Store” by author T. S. Stribling are amazingly hard to come by. It is true that among the millions of books published since Gutenberg perfected his printing machine, there are rarer titles. Some are so scarce that they have been completely lost to history, with not a single copy remaining.

The difference is, almost all of those books came and went without much discussion and a great many found their final resting spot in a public landfill.

Mr. Stribling won the Pulitzer Prize in 1933 for his work, and given that there are collectors who specialize in first edition copies of prize-winners, it makes this book a minor treasure.

For the person trying to put together a set of Pulitzer Winners who is missing this title, there are but a handful offered for sale anywhere.

Lo and Behold!

One of them is in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma.

It is a bit fragile these days, but still represents a nice find.

Oh, and if you’re curious about the value… it is priced under a thousand – which is the going rate for another listed online, a book in better shape but not a true first edition.

You just never know what will turn up.

Bringing home the baking.

Delicious! It could be there is only one thing that tops the aroma of fresh-baked cookies: the taste of those gooey-chocolatey rounders, right out of the oven. Guilty as charged.

You didn’t think I’d place them out without a sample, did you?

Clicking on the image will enlarge the picture and you can see that the display is missing a single cookie. Proof of my will-power that I stopped at one.

The oven arrived this morning and I’m able to do a little cooking in the kitchen, so I fired it up and made a dozen, just to try my hand.

If someone was to invent a canned spray that had the scent of chocolate chip cookies, it might be a seller. Undoubtedly, it would be loaded with calories enough to pack on pounds just by breathing it in.

Things are still coming together.

A couple of more items added to the wall, in the other picture. I discovered several more boxes of books that still need to be reckoned with, and I’m still fighting with the computers. They don’t want to talk to each other.

It isn’t a drawback that affects the store operation, but there are some items on the older machines that I’d like to access without having to email them to myself (my current system of file-sharing). Maybe before the day is out…

I did discover that tragically-slow running machines can be greatly improved. My once-fast Dell desktop had such a case of the Slows yesterday that I thought someone had filled it with molasses. Figuring that there must be some programs running in the background to slow even the internet access, I checked the Startup file and removed a dozen or so programs that began automatically when the computer started.

Voila! When I rebooted the machine, it was back to its old zippy self.

I just need to find a way to recover my old zippy self…

(Chocolate chip cookies are likely not the answer.)

Trash and treasures in moving boxes.

It’s Sunday afternoon, over a month after getting the keys to the new building, and I’m still moving boxes. It is a humid day and I’m already feeling the need to wring myself out.

Today’s focus is getting the antique Sony Vaio and its younger but equally slow brother connected to the primitive store network. It isn’t so much a network as it is three computers strung together in a desperate attempt to preserve the data that exists separately on each machine. Programs and such.

I did transfer the customer database over to the laptop and have been using it since switching the Open sign on last week. The older machines give me a spot to save a backup copy. No ‘cloud’ storage here yet.

Baby steps.

Moving is a colossal pain, but it presents the opportunity to review the life-long collection of what-nots that are being dragged around over the course of a lifetime. As I tend to save rather than ditch them, I’ve assembled a pretty large collection of precious junk.

There have been times I have wondered whether it would be better to send some of these things off to the dustbin, but then I run across something that is worth a smile and a couple of memories. You can click on the image for a close up look at that Gladstein Plumbers infield. We were a mighty foursome. I’m the third from the left in my pre-beard days, back when caps did not signify receding hairlines.

That was the same year I got selected to play on a McAlester Boys Club all-star team for a game in Fort Smith, and during the opening warm-ups tripped on the raised infield turf and took a throw from the catcher on the forehead.

Knocked me out cold.

It also bumped me right out of the ballgame, thus ending my all-star career without so much as an at-bat.

I did take home a nice trophy, in the form of an egg-sized lump just below my hairline.

Needless to say, that was centuries ago, back when Charles Dickens was covering sports and the typewriter had yet to replace the quill and inkwell. In fact, I believe the sport of baseball had just been invented. Actually, looking at the photo credit, I noticed the name of Steve Lalli, whose younger brother Jim was a classmate of mine at St. John’s school in McAlester and quite the artist. I didn’t recall Steve being so much older that he would have a job at the newspaper, but perhaps he was a prodigy in the field of reporting. I was no prodigy in the infield of baseball, but I loved to play.

Maybe that’s why I have the clipping in a cardboard box. Who knows? It is, no doubt, the perfect time to rid myself of all the other papers and flotsam filling this particular carton.

But of course, I’ve closed the lid back up on it and taken it up to the loft for safe storage – for who knows what reason.

As to the store’s progress: Books are being sold, folks are wandering in everyday, and the kitchen equipment is still being assembled for the rollout of the bistro. Hopefully it will be in the next couple of weeks.

As for me, it’s back to the boxes and reconnecting the computers, feeling just a little older at having seen how long ago my sports prime actually was.

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