It turned out, of course, that there weren’t really free marketeers who were standing on principle and holding up the bailout - just congressman scared of not getting re-elected and congressman who needed their wheels greased. The second bailout (same as the first with a bunch of pork and a 90 billion tax cut for rich folks in the form of a alternative minimum tax moratorium - in fairness the AMT does need some help) which weighs in at 451 pages (the original was 3) passed when 58 voters switched. As far as I can tell, anyone who switched is officially a tool - instead of going back and improving the bill, they just added a bunch of expensive crap to it. I’m sure some of the crap is fine, taken on its own, but this was a pretty sad day. For the record Rep. McDermott (D-Wash.) went from “yes” to “no,” the only one to do so. Rather than track down his actual reasons for doing so, I’m going to pretend he’s the last honest man in congress.

Our congressman, Stephen Lynch, voted no both times saying he thought it was unfair to taxpayers. At least he didn’t switch, though I’m not sure “fair” is what we’re shooting for here.

My first trade was Why Bad Things Happen to Good People for Ride the Lightning - I picked up the former, naturally. I followed that up (begrudging full disclosure: the book was for a customer and I have Ride the Lightning on LP) with A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius for Perez-Reverte’s Purity of Blood.

Swaptree’s system is a bunch smoother than any of the others I saw - it only works for books, cds and dvds, and you’re better off staying in the shallow end of the pool esoteric wise, but it’s a nice start. For the others I’ve looked at, it seems like their grasp exceeds their reach - by a lot - they all seem to be shooting for the Ebay of bartering and that’s going to be difficult. The killer app is probably to bring bartering to facebook/cell phones (at least until the lights go out).

Still some free marketeers out there, at least in theory, as bailout 1.0 fails. Interesting stuff - the two camps are being alternately identified as Main Street (apparently anti-bailout) and Wall Street, Right and Left, Free Market and Interventionist.

People are just screaming at each other on CNBC; for all appearances they’re authentically angry and freaking out, yelling about how Main Street is getting screwed by Wall Street and they’re right to be skeptical about the bailout and what not, and some guy quotes the movie Airplane to “Main Street” saying “Chump don’t want no help, chump don’t get no help.” It was too great - if anyone has this one Tivo, I would love a copy.

When I get back to the store I’m going to figure out how to graph this in books. Sinclair Lewis (Main Street) v. Willaim Dean Howell (The Rise of Silas Lapham), perhaps?

I’d like to add hard sausages to the barter list as well as table cheese.

When you really think about it, books are a terrific investment for the collapse of civilization. They need no electricity, batteries, or complicated equipment, they’re portable and durable and will be one of the only sources of entertainment (other than traveling theaters/circuses and oral poets; if you want to get in early on a growth industry I’d start memorizing epic poems today).

Upon further consideration, I was probably blowing smoke up my own ass when I said “it appears to dove tail with my original theory of real world scarcity provoking rising book prices” in the last post. Possibly no administration since Roosevelt has been as Keynesian (at least as far as not being averse to deficit spending) than the Bush administration. So my real world scarcity theory driving up prices of books evincing the contrary ideology may have to be retired for good. So it goes.

Was a bailout inevitable? We’ll ask John Maynard Keynes (General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, 1936 - our proponent of direct intervention) and Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged - our proponent of brutal free market policies - because no one collects Milton Friedman books).

The 2004 spike of Keynes is crazy but is based on three different books that sold that year so appears genuine. If I could figure out exactly what to attribute it too I’d be rich by now, but it appears to dove tail with my original theory of real world scarcity provoking rising book prices (in this case trickle down Milton Friedmanites running the U.S. government provoking a run on Keynes books - no one really collects Galbraith so there’s no great way of double checking that I can think of off hand. Peter Harrington the eminently respectable and egregiously overpriced London dealer has the only first edition for sale on ABE at $7000.)

How about poor people, working conditions, health care, you ask? I’ll leave you with a chart of Dickens’ Hard Times.

Neither encouraging nor hopeless.

With the U.S. treasury hell bent on printing as much money as possible, and the airwaves rife with news of the impending apocalypse, we at Pazzo decided to take action. Starting Thursday October 2nd, every Thursday afternoon will be Barter Thursdays at Pazzo Books. Initially we’ll be accepting barter items from 1-3 every Thursday afternoon (bartering is better after lunch - we don’t want any low blood sugar blow ups) but we hope to expand this slowly. Ideally we’ll be going gangbusters by the time the U.S. financial system actually does collapse and we’ll barely notice the transition off of currency entirely.

Here’s a short list of items that you might want to swap for books:

Padded envelopes
Canned foods (corned beef hash, pigeon peas, red beans are all favorites)
Salt cod
Records (blues, hip-hop, jazz and indie rock are all worth a try)
Diapers (year and a half size)
Gasoline
Coffee (espresso preferred)
Interesting posters (preferably foreign - esp. Eastern European)
We’ll take anything especially interesting be it a matchbook, a paperweight or a hat

We’ll be adding to this regularly and eventually we hope to have an active swap system in place where we can take anything we have a market for elsewhere. Note to the IRS - we fully intend to comply with all barter laws - at least until you cease to exist.

Studies have shown that the inability of chimpanzees to make intelligent bartering decisions is what prevented them from taking over the world, so we don’t want to backslide now that the chips are down. If I have anything to say about it, the next great species on planet earth after the fall will be Homo sapiens sapiens

Online bartering sites like swaptree have already popped up (we’re testing it out right how and will report back) but it’s just too likely that any crisis will take the internet with it - we need a real world solution.

We’re quite serious about this and to demonstrate the approaching worthlessness of the greenback, I give you the chart of the value of gold:

The outrageous spike there at the end is pretty scary. There was one like it in 1980 (Iran crisis, oil crisis, Russian problems, Japan taking over the world economy - seems eerily familiar), and though we’re all still here, I’m not taking any chances.

What’s interesting is that palladium, a scarce but more industrial rare metal hasn’t run up at all.

That spike around the millennium was probably due to perceived demand for high tech products, but you notice there’s no increase in value recently. Once the financial system collapses and we’re all living in caves there will be little demand for palladium - note how it has actually tanked as the extent of the financial crisis has become clear (this despite the fact that Iron Man uses it in the mini cold fusion reactor that powers his suit. How this didn’t send the price soaring is a mystery).

Enough doom and gloom! Let’s start bartering - every Thursday from 1-3!

I’ve often wondered about hit rates on some of the more unlikely spams I get, but this is probably the best yet:

Dear Sir/Madam,

We are pleased to offer you the following Cranes:-

1 KATO NK550VR
2 KATO NK450B-5
3 TADANO TR250M-5
4 KATO SUMSUNG SG250H
5 KATO KR350
6 TADANO TL200M

Pictures of all Units are available, Prices and details are given Below, Please check!!!

If you have any kind of question please feel free to ask, We shall be more than happy to answer you.

1)
0 METER KATO TRUCK HYDRAULIC CRANE:-
MODEL NO. NK550VR, SERIAL NO. 4211001, YEAR : 2006/09, KMS : 0(ZERO), HOURS : 0(ZERO), CAPACITY : 55 TON!, FIVE SECTION BOOM ,
U SHAPE BOOM, ARMY STOCK, NEVER USED.
PRICE : USD 575,000 CIF DUBAI!

2)
KATO HYDRAULIC CRANE:-
MODEL NO: NK 450B-5, SERIAL NO: 812926, YEAR: 1991,
PRICE: 320,000 USD FOB!!!

3)
KATO SAMSUNG TRUCK CRANE:-
MODEL NO: SG250H-2, SERIAL NO: TBY0016, YEAR: 1993, NISSAN CARRIER
PRICE: 140,000 USD FOB!!!

4)

KATO ROUGH TERRAIN CRANE:-
MODEL NO: KR350, SERIAL NO: ON COMFIRMATION, YEAR: 1990
PRICE: 195,000 USD FOB!!!

5)

TADANO ROUGH TERRAIN CRANE:-
MODEL NO: TR250M-5, SERIAL NO: 518857, YEAR: 1990, HOURS: 8536, LOCATION: JAPAN
PRICE: 121,000 USD CIF THAILAND/ SINGAPORE/ MALAYSIA

6)

ORIGINAL TADANO 20 TON TRUCK HYDRAULIC CRANE:-
MODEL NO. TL200M, YEAR : 1982, LEFT HAND DRIVE, MITSUBISHI CARRIER, MITSUBISHI ENGINE , 3 SECTION BOOM,
4 OPERATING LEVERS, CRANE IS IN GOOD AND READY TO WORK CONDITION
PRICE : USD 52,000 CIF DUBAI/ KARACHI/ DAMMAM!

Looking forward to hear from you soon.

Thank you

Maqsood Zafar Malik
Asst. Manager Sales

Nice little human interst story on West Roxbury businesses Pazzo and Kalembar Dune this afternoon on Channel 5 (here’s a link to the video). The idea for the piece is that second hand shops are recession resistant (I’ve long claimed that used bookstores are counter-cyclical - that link isn’t from very long ago, so does little to prove that I’ve LONG claimed it, but I digress) and able to survive, nay, thrive, in this sketchy economy we find ourselves in.

It’s a very short bit and Brian (who seems quite credible to me, but I’m his brother) doesn’t get to mention much more than frugality as a sales driver, but there is some truth here. While you won’t find me wishing for a bad economy (only liquor stores and bankruptcy attorneys are actually counter-cyclical), this particular one with high gas prices keeping people local, and a weak dollar helping out our international sales (especially at the high end) isn’t the worst for used books (at least not yet; my superstitious side does balk at saying anything like this out loud). Mostly I just love the message though - the entire U.S. financial system may be a smoking ruin, but Pazzo Books is doing fine! I hope viewers take some solace from this.

I’m bringing back book graphs for the election season - we’ll be running a series of match ups to see which authors have thrived in the current intellectual and cultural climate. My initial guess was that prices would move contrary to current events. Books on war would become more popular as war becomes scarcer in the real world (and thus more in demand), prurient books would become more expensive as the world become less prurient, etc. This may not be true, or it may be true in some cases and not in others (real world war leads to more war books but perhaps also more interest in past wars; lack of prurience may lead to disinterest in the prurient. The latter seems far fetched, but you get the idea) - we’ll see.

First up. The great 18th Century moralist William Hogarth (and the 1822 edition of his works) v. the great decadent illustrator Aubrey Beardsley’s edition of Morte D’Arthur (1893 limited to 300 copies).

Hogarth is surprisingly boring but, at least, holds it value (less inflation). The Beardsley spikes are interesting though and, in both cases, appear to be sympathetic to the zeitgest rather than contrary as I’d supposed. The junk bond/cocaine 1980’s lead up to a dizzying spike right into Black Monday in October of 1987. It cools down after the crash but builds back into a secondary spike right around the Clinton/Lewinsky debacle (the bubble bursting as the news hit). It’s difficult to say what we can take away from the current holding pattern.

Next up, Edmund Spencer v. Thomas More.

I’ve finished at least the bones of the new website and even added some shots of the renovation. One problem with wanting to do a simple website turned out to be that (like with simple recipes) faults tended to be magnified - if you’ve ever had surprisingly bad spaghetti and meatballs or a suspiciously atrocious hamburger, you know what I’m talking about. As a result, it took me much longer than I would like to admit (or recall) to put it all together.

One late addition was the Magic Lantern image from Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae, by Athanasius Kircher, 1671. One of the last true renaissance men who aspired to know everything, Kircher wrote upwards of 35 quarto and folio volumes, all extravagantly illustrated. The Kircher Project at Stanford has some highlights.

We will be down in NY for a very Pazzo wedding and closed Friday the 19th through Sunday the 21st - we’ll see y’all Tuesday.

We were just going through a scarce 1819 Boston survey with 130 or so maps from the 1780’s to 1819 and noticed that you can view the whole thing online (and purchase individual prints - though you’d be better off buying our original for just $450, while it lasts). Pretty remarkable - we liked the 1789 Normans Survey with Charlestown in Ruins (14 years after the Battle of Bunker Hill).

Is anyone concerned about Robotic News - a blog run by robots to eavesdrop on what humans are saying about them? Is there no public outcry, no resistance movement? I wouldn’t even have the nerve to post this (since it will no doubt get picked up by the very blog I’m concerned about) if I hadn’t read the excellent and life altering How to Survive a Robot Uprising.

viva la resistance!

There goes one theory - piececounts are down 22.9% (sales 14.2%) in the last quarter according to americandrycleaner.com (yeah, that’s a real website. Additional pressure on the industry is apparently coming from higher hanger prices (this is sort of interesting in an extremely uninteresting way. Apparently China has been dumping wire hangers on the market in order to put everyone else out of business and own the wire hanger business in the U.S. I kid you not. The US commerce department is threatening tariffs etc. etc. This makes it possibly a good time to start a wire hanger business).

We’ll sort this out for you.

Has anyone noticed (how couldn’t you) the boom in dry cleaning business in Roslindale? I count at least three that have opened in the past year or two (two on Belgrade and the new one where we used to be on Washington St.) making at least 6 in Roslindale by my count. It’s madness but the cause is unclear. Some possibilities:

People have taken up eating messy foods (Italian, tacos, grape juice) and aren’t very good at it yet.

Similarly, residents have become suddenly clumsy.

Residents are attending more cocktail parties and/or yacht clubs.

A number of entrepreneurs simultaneously purchased the same business report indicating that Roslindale was ripe for a new dry cleaner.

West Roxbury has outsourced their dry cleaning to Roslindale (the Zoots on Centre St, recently shuttered).

In the UK, the ban on smoking in pubs was linked to a decline in dry cleaning business (less need for removing that stale cigarette smell - I guess we could probably trace a decline in suit sales back to this as well) - perhaps they’re smoking on the sly in Rozzie? I have noticed a marked decline in people milling around on the sidewalk outside - let’s say BK’s.

A recent poll suggests that 34% of New Yorkers have taken second jobs (or worked overtime) to combat the slowing economy. This means more suits and shirts and less time to clean them. Perhaps dry cleaning is one of those counter-cyclical businesses in certain markets?

Though, like most right thinking individuals, I’m largely sickened by our democratic process by now, I can’t shake how McCain seems more like America’s weird Uncle every time I see him. He really is starting to creep me out - and now this:

A huge lot of contemporary mysteries just came into the shop - Saylor, Crais, Montalban, Rankin, and a ton more, probably 200 in total. Also a large lot of World War II books - mostly short books on specific vehicles, say the Messerschmidt or Russian Soft top transports, but a variety of other topics as well. Almost entirely the Europe side of the fighting. Many can be browsed here.

And a few interesting things from our last auction - I’ll get some scans up soon (our old scanner died en route to the new location).

Edited to add, here’s a great Rover ad - apparently the first colour advertisement in the UK.

I’ve changed my mind - perhaps you could do it like The Ninth Gate (A film version of Perez-Reverte’s The Club Dumas with the Club Dumas plot line removed and replaced by, oh yeah, nothing) and remove the meta fiction and make it a story about a lazy university student trying to write a comic novel.

Anyway.
If one were to stay with the meta fiction, I’d like to suggest Gabriel Byrne as The Pooka MacPhellimey unless that’s too obvious in which case I’d suggest Mel Gibson (renewing his reputation by doing some indie work) and Colin Farrell (who Gleeson worked with on In Bruges) as Sweeney. I’ll have a think on the others.

The other day, a customer, noticing our Myles na Gopaleen quote on the back of our bookmark, mentioned that a friend of his (Brendan Gleeson of Braveheart, In Bruges) had bought the film rights to At Swim Two Birds, Flann O’Brien’s brilliantly funny metafiction about, among many other things, an author’s characters contriving to break free of his grip while he sleeps. This seems as mad a film to try and make as the recent Tristram Shandy, another great Irish comic novel, which was about, among other things, the impossibility of making Tristram Shandy into a movie.

I looked into it and Gleeson mentioned a few years ago that he was working on a treatment of At Swim - I’d be fascinated to know how if this went anywhere, though I didn’t see any more recent mention of the project. There was a German attempt, In Schwimmen-Zwei-Vögel, that is supposed to be quite regrettable, and any filming would certainly be fraught with peril, but I think if you really stuck with the central metafiction of the author and his characters striving for autonomy, and ignored all the other madness (inspired though it is), it could really turn out in a limited way - you’d just have to make the impossibility of the project work with you rather than against you as Shandy did at its best.

It will probably give a miss to the pitch perfect satire of Old Irish heroic literature though, so we’ll likely miss the cinematic version of three fifties of fosterlings playing handball against Finn MacCool’s backside. A shame.

Finn MacCool was a legendary hero of old Ireland. Though not mentally robust, he was a man of superb physique and development. Each of his thighs was as thick as a horse’s belly, narrowing to a calf as thick as the belly of a foal. Three fifties of fosterlings could engage with handball across the wideness of his backside, which was large enough to halt the march of men though a mountain pass.

And this just from page 2.