Time for the Garage Sale: Jeff Talks Prep and Pleads

As always, my timing sucks because I'm so happy Graeme's got a post up that I hate the idea someone might miss it with all the following hoo-ha I'm about to throw your way. So please make sure to see Graeme's post below! Thank you.

So it's time for the annual hillwide garage sale in Bernal Heights this Saturday: that means people all over the hill will be having sales in front of their homes and apartments. And it means that, once again, I will be out on Cortland Avenue with a table, a bunch of long boxes, and some embarrassingly low prices: after much consideration, I've decided to hold my prices to a quarter a book.

Google maps is being kinda dicky without map links, but here's one to my rough location: 515 Cortland Avenue, 94110.

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&
geocode=&q=515+Cortland+Ave,+San+Francisco,+CA
+94110&sll=37.739601,-122.412007&sspn=0.007772,
0.019312&ie=UTF8&ll=37.74296,-122.413852&spn
=0.007771,0.019312&z=16&layer=c&cbll=37.739054
,-122.416435&panoid=HLCG6xVb0K-nW0iBtW78qg

The Bernal Heights Neighborhood Center, which organizes the sale, hasn't told me the exact location, but it's somewhere on Cortland between Andover and Moultrie.

Interestingly but probably unsurprisingly, in the year since I've stopped working at CE, the number of books I've bought has diminished significantly: this is probably because not having them right in front of me for eight hours at a stretch has made them easier to resist. I'd made it a point to try and spend less on comix when I left CE but I don't think that influenced things much--more of my spending has moved toward trades, archives, and manga than the actual floppy/pamphlet/single format. (Fortunately, I'm a notoriously poor bellwether for the rest of the industry, otherwise I'd be worried for future of the singles market.) So whereas in the past few years, I've had something like eight longboxes of books for sale, currently it looks like it'll be at most five.

That said, I'm looking to get rid of a lot of duplicates and stuff that has been traded (or at least in good-enough Essential/Showcase format) from across the range of my collection. Here's three quick pictures to give you an idea of what I mean:

Although it's still a work in progress. I mean, having just picked up the HTD omnibus, I really don't need all my issues anymore, so I pulled them and put 'em in the to-sell pile. But those issues have a particular hold on me--some of them I can remember what I was eating when I read them for the first time, or where I bought them, or the quality of light in my room as I reread them for the third or fourth time--and I'm finding myself skittish about letting them go. I was always a reader, not a collector or a speculator, but I find myself wishing now I'd been more of one (I was flipping through my copy of Hulk #181 today and, sure enough, I'd clipped the stamp like a good little Marvelite), just so that the filthy lucre could provide a tipping point in this tug-of-war between my past and my present. Strangely, it's the more personal stuff--like Howard The Duck--I feel more like letting go for a quarter. It's like returning an animal to the wild or something.

Uh, anyway, that's all a long winded way of saying there are going to be some very good deals. Depending on how manic or depressive I let myself get about all this, maybe some very, very good deals. If you're in the city this weekend, please think about showing up between 9 and 4 on Saturday on Cortland between Andover and Moultrie. Introduce yourself and I'll try to press a free comic in your hands or something. Feel free to drop me an email with any questions, or leave 'em in the comments link.