It is February.

One month til March.

Then spring.

I’m anxious. This especially brutal winter has taken a lot out of me.

Beneath the snow
Below dead fallen leaves
Under frozen earth
Life sleeps deep
Spring shows no flicker
But it is there
Life resting, waiting
For warmth and sun

I enjoyed the weekend. Standing is ok. Bending is NOT. The light guys finished the loading docks.

It is brilliant out there.

I worked as hard as my bum leg let me over the weekend. Standing on the left hamstring-injured appendage doesn’t hurt acutely, but as the day passes, it aches more and more.

It was fun—except when it wasn’t. I was able to get to some of the aging problematic carts. They can be daunting, as there is almost nothing on those upon which I can make a determination with a glance.

What do you think?

Every book requires close inspection—often I must refer to the title page or delve even further into the book.

On Sunday, I was alone in the sorting area because there were no sorters in. Therefore, no one was creating fresh carts of old books, and no one was filling in the holes as I dug them.

I made inroads in the Sisyphean system that I created. 45.5 years of overnight success.

More sales. More books. More work.

There were some nice finds.

The War of the Worlds.

A first edition.

A signed E.M. Forster.

And this red wyvern cover.

I was able to kill off a lot of problematic carts. When I am faced with a cart like this, it is a combination of pain and pleasure. There are bound to be good books on those problematic carts. But most won’t make the cut for online or bookstore sales. The painful part is that most need to be closely inspected inside and out. I can’t just make decisions scanning the spines.

When I could stand no more… that is when to stand any more was too painful… I left for home.

There was a full moon.

It illuminated the snowscapes with that faux daylight devoid of color. In the woods, hundreds of tree trunks were rising black from the white forest floor.

Why do people collect first editions?

Rolland Comstock was a first-edition collector in Springfield, Missouri until he was murdered in the kitchen of his country mansion. He was shot three times in the head and once in the stomach. I think I remember my old friend Allen Ahearn telling me he had a first edition in his hands when he was found on the floor of his office (which was also the kitchen.) Was it Lord of the Flies? I can’t remember. It has been a long time since we talked about it. Allen’s gone, so I can’t ask him.

Comstock got a good deal of press about his collection. Nick Basbanes—author of the classic book-collecting tome A Gentle Madness included him in the follow-up book Patience & Fortitude. (Which are the names of the marble lions in front of the New York Public Library.)

Comstock also got a great deal of coverage about his still unsolved murder.

Allen and Pat Ahearn and Basbanes were called in by the family to help figure out what to do with Rolland’s 50,000 modern literary first editions.

They created a catalogue of the best books they could get.

Basbanes wrote an introduction. The catalogue is a book in itself. 1265 items. Perhaps 175 pages—plus or minus. I’ve had a copy in my powder room since before COVID. I haven’t removed it… why? It is a fascinating document for a bookseller. The aura of an unsolved murder mystery adds to the fascination. For me, it is also a cautionary tale of “what might have been.”

I wrote my take on the hypermodern boom and bust here in 2018. When the “world wide web” became a “thing” in the late 1990s, I was wise enough to start putting books on the internet. (I agreed to do so, kicking and screaming that it was ridiculous because who would “buy a book on a computer.”) Luckily, Clark Kline and my brother Tony overcame my initial recalcitrance.

If we hadn’t gone online, I’m sure Wonder Book would have been another casualty in the bookstore purges in the early 2000s. (For example, I believe the DC region had about 125 used bookstores in the early 1990s. I’m guessing that around 2010 there were 10 used bookstores left. Wonder Book was three of those.)

What has this to do with Comstock and his 50,000 books?

I recall vividly a regular customer telling me sometime in the mid-90s, “I got that on the internet for half what you’re asking.” It was some Stephen King limited signed edition. My price was $700. My erstwhile customer got it for $350. I paid about $350 for the copy I had.

????!!!!

What was going on?

The early days of internet bookselling were like being in the wild west. The market was in constant upheaval. To be a bookseller, you didn’t really need to know a lot about books. Knowing about computers was more important. Books became “units” in most cases. Buyers would almost always go right to the bottom—the lowest price—a penny for a modern book that might have hundreds of copies of nearly identical hardcovers listed online. These could often be modern literary first editions. The prices would really start at a “penny” (plus shipping and “handling.”) “Handling” was where they made a profit. Thus began the reign of terror executed by the “Penny Booksellers.”

It was supply and demand smacking traditional bookselling in the face… with a 2×4.

Many of my friends and colleagues reacted to this with righteous indignation. I reacted that way as well until I saw extinction looming. To survive, used booksellers had to become business people. Kicking and screaming, if necessary.

“These are $5 books,” I would tell people with collections for sale. “Postpaid. And there are a hundred copies just like this online starting at a penny. It doesn’t matter what you paid or what they are worth to you; in the marketplace, they are overpopulated, and we have to practically give them away to move them.”

Horrified looks. Side-eye glances at this incompetent bookseller.

Back to Comstock and his hoard.

Flipping through this beautiful catalog is now a cautionary tale.

There are nine copies of signed Madison Smartt Bell first editions offered for sale. One at $75. One at $100. Four at $150. One at $350. One at $500.

Bell is an excellent and award-winning writer.

A search on viaLibri for signed first editions yields some hefty prices.

If you switch the filter to “Lowest Price First”, the results are shocking.

This doesn’t reflect on the books or the author. If anything, they sold too well to have so many available in the secondary market.

And author signings were hugely popular during the hypermodern boom.

Rolland looks like he could be the brother of my book-and-life-mentor Carl Sickles. Same face in very many ways. Same physique. Same hair island. Same half-glasses perched on the end of his nose. I hope he was like Carl in sweetness and generosity as well.

Maybe not. Going down this rabbit hole reveals some pretty crazy things. He had a “pack” of hybrid wolves—in his home? Huge family squabbles.

This uses news clippings and photos to show much of what happened after the murder.

Apparently, the mansion went to auction and got no bids. The “library” addition was a white elephant that chased buyers away? Doesn’t make sense. Maybe the place was a mess or had other problems that would be too expensive to fix?

One thing bothered me about the catalog.

This is the photo on the back cover. Look closely, and you’ll see stacks of identical books on the shelves. His “gentle madness” expanded at some point to where he thought, “if one copy of a book is good, ten copies is ten times better.” [paraphrased]

Madness.

During the hypermodern boom, booksellers would speculate on modern first editions. Remainder dealers—like the great Daedalus—would benefit from this as they would buy 10, 20, 100 copies of a remaindered novel in hopes the price would keep rising.

Investment?

Speculation?

I recall Daedalus putting out a notice that they would no longer welcome booksellers rooting through their inventory, checking to see if any of the remainders in their vast bins were 1sts.

I speculated some, though mostly when I bought remaindered modern firsts they’d go out right away.

One title I did invest in was the Don Grant limited edition of Stephen King’s Darktower II: The Drawing of the Three. As I recall, I bought all of Grant’s remaining inventory at FULL price ($35?—a lot of money at the time.) I put most in storage and forgot about them. Some years later during the early internet boom, they were rediscovered and put online one at a time at much, much higher price!

Success!

I wish I had a box or two still. Maybe I do?

A notable failure was when I joined the crowd during the rush of booksellers when the doors opened at CIROBE one year. Publishers and remainder dealers had tables of the offerings. Time was of the essence, as the best finds often sold out in minutes. The scene was madness—think of the “Running of the Bulls.” Hundreds of book nuts rushing into the aisles in a frenzy of avarice and treasure hunting and knowledge. I ran straight to the Random House table. My buddy John Adams wasn’t there, but another rep I knew was. I scanned the tables. There was a sample copy of Michener’s Recessional—the signed limited edition in a slipcase. Was it $12 wholesale?!

“Paul, I’ll buy all these. Put this under the table so no one else sees it.”

I don’t recall how many I ended up with, but I do recall it took years to sell them—maybe I broke even.

Rolland Comstock… a mystery within a mystery… What happened to the 50,000 books? Some came to Maryland. Second Story had a “Dutch Auction.”

Others were dispersed to Midwest booksellers. A hoard of hypermoderns in around 2009 (the catalog is undated) would have been an unwieldy white elephant.

You can find a lot of Comstock’s books for sale online still.

The goldrush days were great fun though. Wonder Book did very well. I came up with a policy of wrapping the dust jackets of any first edition $15 and up in a “Brodart.”

The company was shocked when we started ordering them by the thousands. A rep contacted me and asked what we were doing with all of them.

“First editions…”

We were featured on the cover of their big fat catalog that year—maybe our first national recognition.

Wonder Book has survived all the various booms and busts in the book world since 1980. We’ve ridden the waves and then, often reluctantly, got off without losing our… jackets.

Oww!

Monday, the temperature may get up to 30! It was 15 when I awoke.

I will stop complaining about the weather if the deep freeze is ending.

But just to be clear, The Washington Post is saying this may be the worst cold snap in 150 years.

Extreme cold spell shaping up as one of D.C.’s longest in 150 years
The extreme cold spell could last beyond Groundhog Day.

So there! I wasn’t being dramatic.

Ernest and I are going to Gaithersburg. It is a brilliant sunny morning on I-270. Sitting in the van hurts. I’m trying to keep the weight off my left side.

15 bookcases were put in there last week, and I want to give input on what to do with them.

Wednesday morning, 5 am. In the dark…

The flames dance merrily against the glass doors of the Vermont Castings Defiant Woodstove.

The Defiant provides more than heat: it’s a skillfully crafted, timeless piece of American history. In fact, the last original Defiant Parlor Stove is located in the Smithsonian’s National History collection. Named over 40 years ago to “defy the wintery blast,” today’s Defiant does that and more.

I turned the furnace off yesterday. I wanted to remind myself of how well the woodstove can do when the temperatures are not in the single digits.

Down around DC, many schools remain closed. When I visited the Gaithersburg store on Monday, I saw that many of the sidewalks had not been cleared 8 days after the last flakes fell.

This morning, it was 27 degrees. The high will be 31. Tropical!

When I let Giles out yesterday, he decided to do a walkabout in the forest. Though he is about 60 pounds and his very long legs look like stilts, his footsteps didn’t punch through the unblemished snow. He would slip a bit every few steps, but his path was about a foot above the earth. He left no tracks in the snow.

I canceled my trip to Switzerland on Monday. There is no way I could sit that long. Switzerland in February. What was I thinking? Impulsive, I guess.

Friday, February 6th. I’m in Zurich. Going on a tour of Switzerland in a couple of days.

Nope. My third accident in 16 months has had me in bed a great deal. I’ve kept my painful purple left leg elevated on pillows with ice packs atop them a lot. I hope accidents “come in threes” and I’m done with it. All were and were not my fault.

I’ve done a lot of reading. I binge-read Barbara’s The Jackal’s Head.

1968. Her first work under the Elizabeth Peters pseudonym. (Beth is her daughter. Pete her son.) It is pretty primitive and silly compared to her later Egyptian Amelia epics.

It is 15 degrees. The next three days will begin in single digits. The snow has not melted. Many parts of the DC region are still unplowed. A lot of schools are opening late—10 school days after the snowstorm.

When I got home yesterday afternoon, I forced myself to mount the ATV. It wasn’t too painful. Straddling doesn’t hurt much. I thought the sun and 30-degree high might have softened the snow I didn’t plow 12 days ago.

Nope. The plow scraped over the bare asphalt. When it got to the snow in front of the SUV—BANG!—it stopped with a jolt. “Snowcrete.”

I can’t reload the cast iron rings on the porch. There’s snow piled up in front of it. I plowed it there. What was I thinking?

“It always thaws quickly in Maryland.”

Well, it will either get warmer or it won’t.

I’m lingering in bed. The Jeep is running out on the driveway. I’m hoping to soften the icy mound against the windshield. I’ve driven the truck every day for two weeks, and it’s getting tedious.

I’m having a mug of Yunnan Imperial—The King of Chinese Black Tea.

It is so good.

We met about January’s store sales yesterday. Boom! All three stores had increases over 2025. Sales of kids are up substantially. That’s great news. I send most of the kids’ books to the stores myself. Odd… I enjoy it. It’s like eating popcorn. It is a kind of evangelism—getting books into the hands of the next generation.

There’s no rush to get to work today. It is the first day of my vacation. I’ve been in every day since September!

And I won’t change my socks. That act is an excruciating acrobatic endeavor still.

OWW!