BtBG Reader goes shopping, and scores!

Last weekend saw the annual Ravyn Family trip to the peaceful shores of Lake Chautauqua to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city, eat good food, and watch fireworks. Oh, and to hunt for rare and hard-to-get books. The Chautauqau region features both an immense used book store, kept generously and diversely stocked with trade-ins from artists visiting the nearby Chautauqua Institution, as well as a fairly large flea market out in the middle of an unused airstrip.

I always come away from the weekend with two or three insteresting finds, but this year saw me driving home with no less than 13! Here's what I got:

E.R. Burroughs, "Pirates of Venus"(1979ed). This is the only one of his Venus books I never got a chance to read, so this was a treat to find, and good "research" for my Warriors of the Red Planet game.

E.R. Burroughs, "The Moon Maid"(?ed). Another Burroughs work I've never read. With 90-odd books, that shouldn't surprise me, but it does. I can't tell what edition this is, but tucked in the book, likely as a bookmark, was a campaing receipt from July 2nd, 1969. I can only imagine, 40 years ago, someone trading this in? Who knows.

Robert A Heinlein, "Red Planet"(1977ed). One of my favorite Heinlein works, and also good research material for my WotRP game. If you've never read this, its quite a treat, and I believe there are current editions available.

Arthur C. Clarke, "Against the Fall of Night"(1970ed). My favorite Clarke work, and probably in my top 5 sci-fi works of all time. Wonderfully melancholy work set at the end of human history. I had this in a collection of novellas that went AWOL years ago, so I was glad to find this.

John Eric Holmes, "Mahars of Pellucidar"(1976ed). Yes, this is the Holmes of "Holmes Basic" fame, one of the few writers able to secure license to write works set in the worlds of ER Burroughs. It should be an interesting read!

Isaac Asimov, "Second Foundation"(1971ed). I've been re-reading the original trilogy a chapter or two at a time this summer, but was lacking the third volume. Of course the collector in me was a bit sad that I'd have to get the contemperary edition, so I was pleased to find this edition that matches my set!

Talbot Mundy, "Tros of Samothrace"(1976ed). I've been keeping an eye out for this since J's review on Grognardia some months back. I'm looking forward to reading this with an eye towards the origins of D&D, as I did with Dying Earth recently.

Roger Zelazny, "Jack of Shadows"(1971ed). The first of my flea market purchases, I was tickled to find this Hardcover! version of my favorite Zelazny work in a box stuffed with romances and self-help guides. I have a tattered paperback version I loan out, it'll be nice to have an "archival" version I can save for posterity!

A.E. Van Vogt, "Quest for the Future"(1970ed). I've never been a huge fan of Van Vogt, more for lack of experience with his work than anything else. I mainly bought this book because: a)it was in a box with "Jack of Shadows" marked "2 for $1", and b) it has a bright orange cover with a giant iguana-monster lunging out of the sea to eat a hovering spaceman with a movie camera. Awesome!

Marvel Graphic Novel #2, "Michael Moorcock's Elric the Dreaming City"(1982). I'm fairly sure this is either a reprint of the graphic novel printed in EPIC magazine (or EPIC reprinted this). If it is the same version I'm remembering from the early 80's, its a pretty cool version.

Grimtooth's Traps(1981ed). My other flea market find, this was stacked with "Grimtooth's Traps Fore" and "Grimtooth's Traps Ate" (all in mint shape!), sitting inexplicably atop an old sea-chest at a vendor who seemed to deal mainly in antique wood-working tools. Maybe he was building traps out of these books in his spare time? He told me they were $2 each, so I offered him $5 for all three, which he accepted. A quick perusal of ebay tells me picking these three books up would run me $40-60, so a pretty good deal, I guess.

So I have plenty to keep me busy!

Another cool find at the flea market was a set of Batman Colorforms, which I grabbed for my 8-yr-old. Remember Colorforms!? I had the Kiss set when I was a kid...:)