Early Morning Catchup
Feb. 28th, 2005 01:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
skyringIt's past one in the morning. Monday morning. Where's the weekend gone?
The house is tidy and the lawn is mowed. That's something.
We got to have dinner on Saturday at the in-laws, meeting Kerri's aunt and uncle from New Zealand. J&J.They have sold their B&B in Te Kaha, making pots of money in the process. Buy low, sell high and run at a loss in the interim. I don't think this would work as well in Australia where capital gains tax would eat up a lot of the proceeds. Uncle J was spending some of the profit on an Austin Healey, which he has long lusted after and finally found.
If it was me, I'd buy a classic Mustang, strip out the innards and put in fast glass, cruise control, a CD system, a modern engine and so on. Decent brakes and seatbelts. I love the look of the car, but classic Sixties automotive technology leaves me cold.
DD took herself off to the Canberra Show with a bunch of girlfriends and did girly things, returning about midnight, tired and happy. DS was horribly bored with the relatives and towards the end of the evening was making hand signals from the lounge room while we worked through a pot of coffee. Just like me at his age.
J&J had travellers' tales of their work on the minehunter project years ago involving a trip to Italy, missing passports, horror train journeys and encounters with officials who spoke no English. Seemed like the sort of things that are funny in hindsight.
A bit of a lull in book orders. That's OK. I sold a few good ones on Friday.
Every bopokseller has a few titles he looks for because they are guaranteed profit. With me it's "Sex in the Forbidden Zone", a book about men in positions of power exploiting female subordinates. I can sell copies of this title for $US50, which is about ten times what I generally buy it for. Even better are "Run For the Trees" and "Atrocity Week", violent tales of Africa which go for between $US25 and $US50 and can generally be found in bookfair piles for bugger all. The first copy of RFTT I ever found was at the tip shop in absolute mint condition, amazing for a thirty year old mass paperback. i was even more amazed when I looked up the price. I've sold a few copies since then.
Old childrens books are always good. If it's forty years old and in good nick, it's generally worth a bundle. The dustjacket is usually the key indicator - a fine book in a poor DJ isn't worth as much as the other way around. That's because the children who were the original market for these books wouldn't put them carefully aside in a bookshelf and love them for decades - no, they'd read them, leave them lying around, make doll houses and forts out of them, put cocoa mugs on them and so on. Naturally the fragile dust jackets suffered.
I'll miss the Canberra Lifeline bookfair this year. I guess I prefer being overseas, but still it's a pain to miss the event.
The house is tidy and the lawn is mowed. That's something.
We got to have dinner on Saturday at the in-laws, meeting Kerri's aunt and uncle from New Zealand. J&J.They have sold their B&B in Te Kaha, making pots of money in the process. Buy low, sell high and run at a loss in the interim. I don't think this would work as well in Australia where capital gains tax would eat up a lot of the proceeds. Uncle J was spending some of the profit on an Austin Healey, which he has long lusted after and finally found.
If it was me, I'd buy a classic Mustang, strip out the innards and put in fast glass, cruise control, a CD system, a modern engine and so on. Decent brakes and seatbelts. I love the look of the car, but classic Sixties automotive technology leaves me cold.
DD took herself off to the Canberra Show with a bunch of girlfriends and did girly things, returning about midnight, tired and happy. DS was horribly bored with the relatives and towards the end of the evening was making hand signals from the lounge room while we worked through a pot of coffee. Just like me at his age.
J&J had travellers' tales of their work on the minehunter project years ago involving a trip to Italy, missing passports, horror train journeys and encounters with officials who spoke no English. Seemed like the sort of things that are funny in hindsight.
A bit of a lull in book orders. That's OK. I sold a few good ones on Friday.
Every bopokseller has a few titles he looks for because they are guaranteed profit. With me it's "Sex in the Forbidden Zone", a book about men in positions of power exploiting female subordinates. I can sell copies of this title for $US50, which is about ten times what I generally buy it for. Even better are "Run For the Trees" and "Atrocity Week", violent tales of Africa which go for between $US25 and $US50 and can generally be found in bookfair piles for bugger all. The first copy of RFTT I ever found was at the tip shop in absolute mint condition, amazing for a thirty year old mass paperback. i was even more amazed when I looked up the price. I've sold a few copies since then.
Old childrens books are always good. If it's forty years old and in good nick, it's generally worth a bundle. The dustjacket is usually the key indicator - a fine book in a poor DJ isn't worth as much as the other way around. That's because the children who were the original market for these books wouldn't put them carefully aside in a bookshelf and love them for decades - no, they'd read them, leave them lying around, make doll houses and forts out of them, put cocoa mugs on them and so on. Naturally the fragile dust jackets suffered.
I'll miss the Canberra Lifeline bookfair this year. I guess I prefer being overseas, but still it's a pain to miss the event.
