This evening's Selections - qsell

The Prophet Secrets of the Heart Gibran 2 books Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam w picture Sarkis Katchadourian Discover Yourself Through Palm Reading Rita Robinson Japanese Fairy Tales Teresa Williston 1904 Hbk 3 Aztec Books Offered As A Lot No Reserve The Cyberiad by Stanislaw Lem 1985 Pbk Saint Tail 2 TokyoPop Manga NR The Happy Hollisters At Circus Island J West 1955 Easy Rider The Screenplay 1969 pbk 1st Edition The Life and Works of Escher hbk 1995 NR Richard Wetherill Anasazi by F McNitt 1966 NR Tales From Shakespeare Charles Lamb 1918 Hbk NR The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz 1997 El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote De La Mancha Spanish Pennsylvania Parker and the Black Cat Nell Robbins HB The Oxford Companion to Wine 1999 Jancis Robinson Thanks For the Memory Romantic Strings Orchestra BBC Music Rachmaninoff Vespers Import CD Rare BBC Music Chausson Franck Live BBC Import CD BBC Music Dmitri Shostakovich Symphony No 4 Import CD The Poems of Roy Edwards Vesey hbk 1943 Texas Poet BBC Music Saint Saen Import Piano Concerto 2 Symp 3 BBC Music Haydn The Creation Import CD BBC Music Mahler Symphony No 4 Import CD BBC Music Eine kleine Nachtmusik Mozart Import CD BBC Music Dvorak The Golden Spinning Wheel Import CD BBC Music The Glory of Venice Import CD BBC Music Baltic Voyage Part Kapp Tubin Import CD Ilan Volkov Conducts Mendelssohn Haydn Schubert BBC DIXIT DOMINUS Handel Vivaldi BBC Music Import Franz Schubert In Performance 2 CD set NPR classics Soviet American Relations Yesterday and Today Rare The Diary of Che Guevara Bantam Edition from Ramparts Jazz Collector Edition Gillespie Dizzy CD 1991

We thought the clouds today looked like the opening credits of the Simpsons, but they moved around faster than we thought and the illusion had sort of vanished within a few minutes by the time we got the Hi-Tech-And-Antique Staff Photographer roused from his stupor. Or would that be more accurately phrased:  "reality imitating an illusory display"? We have not put up many of our pictures lately. We would rather complain about all the work we are doing in revising our listings to take out references to checks and money orders being accepted. This is a PayPal only store now. By orders from headquarters. But he rushed outside, once he was roused and took a few digital snaps of the glorious Texas sky.

That would be a quote from the Roman emperor and philosopher, Marcus Aurelius. We like to look at his "Meditations" from time to time. And we like pithy sayings that can fit in the title of a blog.

Here is a picture from our illustrated book of Fairy Tales . It is called "Japanese Fairy Tales" and was printed in 1904. It is an early edition, if not a first edition. It has some nibbles  along the edges of the covers from bugs in the days before air conditioning. But they just made a few little nibble marks and probably left before any of us were born. So we are not marketing it as a collectible, but as something to read to children. It has some pictures, color and black and white, done in traditional  Japanese style. It appears the badger has a parasol in his right hand and a colored fan on the left. I am sure no child alive today could resist something like that. Have a look-see as they say.

Stories for Children- qsell

Japanese Fairy Tales Teresa Williston 1904 Hbk

We are listing stuff on Half.com. We have over a hundred items, most of which we never had on eBay before. These are a different, more recent selection of books. If you want to take a look, we have over 100 items and growing. We can't list everything we want on Half - it has to be in Half's book list catalog already, so some of our stuff does not match, like mostly older books from the 60s and before, and pamphlets and art catalogs. We still want to have stuff here on eBay, just maybe a different selection of items.

It is a kind of no-frills environment, and we are still getting used to the slightly different way of doing business. But now we skate back and forth between the two sites without even having to log on a second time. Our store is under our member name hitechandantique - which spread out in human readable type would be "hi tech and antique":

Sometimes having the distilled wisdom of hundreds of minds, sitting aimlessly on the shelf late at night gives us pause for thought. After all each so-called book represents many months, even years of effort  to conceive, write, edit, publish and distribute. Each one is a nexus, a true reservoir of concentrated human mental energy. And some of our titles, like the Chi Gong, Philosophy, advanced mathematics and even Feng Shui are compendiums of folk wisdom, abstract thought and deep concentration.

Some of you may remember the old black and white film,  "The Brain from Planet Arous" with John Agar and Joyce Meadows. The real star of the film were the floating brains, our personal heroes. Gor was the evil one, a criminal in his own world, who literally possessed a earthly human scientist with his superior mental powers. And the films real hero, played by John Agar had to smack the invader in his "Fissure of Rolando" a  landmark  feature in vertebrate brains. But we sort of liked Gor. He could not get by on looks alone, just his crafty powers and his drive to take over the world. We would like to have seen what the world would be like, being controlled by a giant disembodied brain.

Sometimes late at night we remember the floating brains. And we do not always sleep well. Click on the Red Door to see the Pulsating Brains of hundreds of minds. And please do not smack them in their Fissures of Rolando. That would be rude. These are good brains that live on the shelf, waiting to entertain and educate you. Your own frontal lobes will thank you.

We don't like to whine. In fact though we are. We are revising all our listings. We have to pull off all the references to checks and money orders. And we are moving stuff to eBay's sister site: half.com. So we are running around in circles, sort of barking like wild dogs with the keyboards wearing down our fingertips to little stubby nubs.

So we exhort you, we remonstrate with you, verily we compel you with every fibre of our being to break down and buy our store merchandise.

Some of it will be unloaded, looked at with a critical eye, and may never see the light of eBay's colorful web pages again. So here is your final chance, if you are into ultimatums, to purchase this grand and glorious merchandise, the distilled wisdom of hundreds of minds, veritable pulsating brains that long to find refuge on your bookshelves. They call out to you from a distant warehouse, deep below the Hi-Tech-And-Antique eBay Store's Antique vaults, deep below in the limestone caverns, where run rivers measureless to man. In these distant underground chambers the murmuring of the distant voices of long departed souls reside in prodigious tomes. Only a little book-light and these thoughts can be transported to your very own cerebral cortex via your photosensitive ocular nerve extensions. Click below to find out more. Your frontal lobes will thank you.

With some writers and artists - actually comic book / graphic novel artists / writers. It was exciting. Except the acoustics were less than optimal, so we only heard about 80 percent of what was said.

But being around creative types is in some ways like being creative yourself. You look at them and say "They dress in the same kind of clothes, hem and haw just like me, and even look a little paunchy and have receding hairlines, that could be me". Of course that was during the panel discussion. Later in the rush of fans to the podium, I realized that these guys were accomplished artists, as they signed copies of their work for someone who had enough foresight to bring some copies.

The art work on the covers was superb. So maybe I could be doing that if I sat down and started drawing non-stop for a few years. Or maybe I will find a creative vein and learn how to do it in a couple of weeks. Or maybe I should put buying a pen on my to do list. That's what you need to be a graphic novel artist. A fancy pen. And maybe some pencils. And some paper. Oh, now I remember - it gets complicated. I'll have to give up listing books. And that would also mean less time for blog writing.

I think I'll go take a long nap. Good night.