Steal these documents!

In honor of tax day (not for us—we got an extension), let us celebrate this relic from a more innocent, bygone age, when advertising the precise location of your valuable documents seemed like a swell idea. When identity theft was something that only happened on soap operas, and was usually the result of an amnesia-causing accident orchestrated by an evil twin. When a PIN was something you just stuck in a cushion shaped like a tomato. Ahhh, those were the days, my friends, we thought they'd never end, until they did.

Hung up

A few weeks ago I mentioned my purchase of San Antonio's Most Famous Flamenco Dancer's vintage telephone and I know you were dying to see it, so here it is. Tres ’80s chic, no? At least I assume it's ’80s. I can't find another Soundesign phone like it on the internets so it must be very rare and very valuable, not that I have any plans to sell it when it looks so perky sitting atop a pile tech fossils in my garage.

I've thought about using it but have you ever tried to use a restored/refurbished vintage telephone? They are, at best, unreliable and super-inconvenient. I have a beauteous orange Ericofon (midcentury Swedish telephone) on my nightside table, which works, intermittently, but is so damn inconvenient that when the phone rings I find myself sprinting to another room to pick up one of the ugly cordless phones we have scattered throughout the house. I'm not a big phone talker to begin with, so the idea of being tethered to my vintage phone, stranded in one small corner of my bedroom instead of being able to free-range from refrigerator to water cooler to computer to laundry room to patio and back again while on the phone sounds like hell. The only scenario in which I can envision myself contentedly yakking on the phone in bed is when I'm propped up on my pillows, wearing a satin bed jacket and popping bonbons—but that so rarely happens, you know?

So the questions of the day are: Do aesthetically pleasing cordless phones exist? And why do I have a land line anyway?

Used book sale fever!

So yeah, today was the day we look forward to all year (well, one of the days): the massive annual used book sale thrown by the PTA of a neighboring school district. This crazy book party takes place in a huge gymnasium and every year I swear I am going to bring a cart, or a wagon, or a stroller, or some kind of wheeled vehicle to tote my book booty but what I end up doing is bringing four large tote bags (including one of those big blue ones you buy at Ikea—the one that could hold at least two small children and a bunch of swedish dishrags), thinking I'm not going to need to use them all, and then what happens? I end up filling all four ginormous bags before I've even worked my way down the first couple of rows and I have to drag them everywhere (because they don't have wheels!) and it's very painful and inconvenient for everyone. How I miss the rickety shopping carts that were sold on practically every street corner in Brooklyn! Here in Texas the concept of buying a shopping cart is difficult for most people to grasp: Why would you need one when you drive everywhere? Well, good point. You don't need one, except at this particular book sale, and one or two others I can think of.

I logged a little over two hours of throwing elbows with the usual library sale crowd—teachers, home-schoolers, romance-loving seniors, scanner-wielding amazon book seller trolls, beleaguered mothers using their strollers to hold books, toddlers trailing in their wake. I never see any other vintage book picker a-holes like me, except for my homey at Vintage Kids' Books my Kid Loves, who gets so worked up by this sale she's ready to vomit within the first 15 minutes. We try to work in tandem, more or less, but it's impossible to pull books for each other when you have to push them around them gym like Sisyphus and his boulder. She managed to get a great haul, much of which she has wisely already posted on her etsy shoppe, whereas I have pointlessly and profitlessly started instagramming mine here. Should I go back tomorrow? But tomorrow is our "city-wide garage sale"! Sunday for the bag sale? Hmmm...

Update:
Well, I ended up going back on Sunday for the bag sale. I was skeptical at first because you had to buy their shopping bag for $15 ($10 for each additional). It didn't seem that cheap, right? But then when I started stuffing them with all kinds of scores, including a weird Christmas book by Richard Burton (and signed by him!), I realized it was totally worth it and that those HEB totes hold a lot more than you would think. There's a couple copies of A Christmas Story over at Abebooks ranging from $400 to $500, not that I think there's much of a market for Christmas books by old-school Hollywood stars. Theoretically, I came out waaay ahead, and that's enough for me.

Bananas for budgies

I think I first learned about this Forgotten Bookmarks guy in Country Living magazine. Yes, I am a dinosaur who often gets her information from these things called magazines. Anyway, seems he's fellow dino, though a few key differences lie between us: He appears to sell his books for an honest living whereas I allow mine to pile up around me till I'm forced to devote a weekend to dividing them into neat new stacks, some of which are marked "to sell" and others "to give away," at which point they begin to gather fresh new dust, and remain unsold and ungiven, and are eventually engulfed by new piles, undivided, unorganized, un-neatened until I start the whole process all over again. No, this guy has an actual store and he also has a clear and simple idea behind his blog: sharing the cool and often poignant or odd things he finds inside old books. So it's no surprise he also landed a book deal. This blog wishes it were so straightforward. Like the name—thingummery—what does that even mean?

Oh, whatever, I don't know. I do know that I too collect the bonus oddities I find sandwiched between the pages of old books and periodicals. I also wonder how they ended up there and I feel badly about separating them. Like my favorite, the stripper card in the sewing book, which I wrote about here. And here we have another example, though it's not quite as titillating.

I bought this copy of Bananas magazine at one of those filthy, moldy, willies-giving sales that always have the best stuff and it's almost all too damaged to buy. HATE that. But I certainly couldn't resist a copy of Bananas with Willie Ames on the cover. Eight is Enough said, am I right? I'm such a prehistoric creature that I used to buy this ’70s-’80s pop culture magazine, the poor relation of Dynamite, at the Scholastic Bookmobile. As I was thumbing through the issue and trying not to get cooties (seriously, it looks like it spent the last decades languishing on someone's bathroom floor), this Polaroid portrait of a parakeet fell into my lap. As the owner of a pair of caged birds (zebra finches), I sympathize with the photographer, who probably just wanted a snap of his/her pet but ran up against a hard truth: Caged birds don't make good subjects. The pictures are all cage and very little bird.

Anyhoo, parakeets kind of give me a bad feeling because I had one as a kid. My parents gave him to me for my birthday, though I don't recall ever asking for or wanting bird. I'm thinking they were just trying to make me stop pining for a pony. I remember going to the pet store and peering into this big glass tank set into the wall and it was just a blur of blue and green wings. I kept trying to point to the one I wanted and I'm pretty sure the pet store guy just gave me the first one he could catch. Maybe I held that against the bird because I named him Sinbad, after my favorite movie, and never paid him much attention after that. I thought he was kind of gross. I never let him out of his cage and I didn't make more than a half-hearted effort to teach him to talk. Eventually he moved into my brother's room and my brother totally loved him and let him fly around his room and sit on his shoulder and eat of his hand but he never learned how to talk, just uttered the two syllables of his name in a garbled bird language, and I was always blamed for that. When he died and was buried in a velvet box at the foot of the yard beneath the lilac bushes that are no longer there, was I even invited to the funeral?

Oops, I seem to have gone off on another tangent. See what I mean? Not concise, not clear, this blog will never have its very own book deal.

A tisket, a tasket

Estate sale shopping rule #143: Always hit the bedroom closets and thoroughly peruse the top shelves, even if you're skeeved by old clothes. And honestly, if you're skeeved by old anything, why are you reading this blog? Same reason you watch Hoarders? Or did you go to kindergarten with me? For whatever reason, the top shelf is where you're likely to unearth the most rad accessories. I'm visualizing the totally out-of-reach top shelves of my tall-and-skinny dysfunctional closet and I think there are some serious scores up there—weird, impractical bags, vintage silk nighties, motorcycle boots... Too bad I'm not having an estate sale anytime soon cuz I'd probably buy something from myself. (No, that does not make sense but accidentally buying something that once belonged to me seems like something I might do.)

I don't really bother shopping for vintage clothes anymore—I'm too lazy to deal with the inevitable repairs, stain removals and alterations. I also find that, as I negotiate the shoals of my forties, I'm cleaving more and more to my standard jeans-and-white-buttondown-shirt uniform. But I do find it hard to resist cute vintage accessories because (a) size isn't an issue and (b) bedbugs are less likely to be an issue. Like, how could a bedbug set up camp in this awesome basket purse?

According to my "research"—which consisted of reading descriptions written by etsy shop owners and vintage online boutiquers who may or may not know what they're talking about—this bamboo "birdcage" purse dates from the 1950s or ’60s or ’70s, and you could coordinate it with any outfit by lining it with a different scarf. I just thought it was pretty. I was tempted at first to let it collect dust, yet another impractical bag on the top shelf, but then I decided that would be a terrible waste of such an aesthetically pleasing conversation piece. I took it to one black-tie gala and found it rather difficult to balance drink/napkin/canape/bag and shake hands with sundry partygoers. When I left it on my chair, someone sat on it and I nearly fainted (remarkably it sustained no damage). And as with those clear plastic or lucite purses, you have to edit the contents pretty carefully. Drawbacks, to be sure, but this is a bag that wants to be seen—I'm waiting for just the right lawn party.

Better than Atari

Right, so this thing.

Lindsay "scored" this Roberts Rally IV proto-Atari game console at a crazy ’70s sale—my friend Burgin, who hit it on the first day, breathlessly, rightly described it as "It's like your ’70s childhood exploded in this one house—you've got to go!" How could we not go?

Lindsay gets a little glazed when surrounded by the totems of his childhood, so he was in heaven, despite the children whining and pulling on his clothes and asking for things. (Where was I? In the room with all the books of course.) Unfortunately, he made a classic estate-sale error: He saw something he liked: a working Atari, with games. He picked it up, examined it, then put it back down, undecided. Never put anything down! If you see something and kinda like it, hold it close till you've made up your mind. Officious estate sale workers might try to pry it from your hands—they'll offer to relieve you of your burden, to write up your ticket—but you just wave them away till you're sure. When Lindsay finally decided to get the Atari, he went back to the room and saw another guy with it tucked under his arm. ARGH.

It's a terrible, empty feeling. Naturally he had to fill that void by buying something else, and the something else—the Roberts Rally IV pong game thingie—is still covered with dust and sitting in the garage. Apparently there's a small problem with the battery pack (there isn't one) but he's confident that he can make it work by crossing some wires, you know, when he gets around to it. And when he gets around to it, the kids will lay down their wii microphones long enough to play the four games built in to the system: hockey, tennis, squash and squash practice. Woo-hoo, squash practice!

I buy therefore I am

I was an English major in college. I like to read stories. And write about reading stories and sometimes write my own stories. Lindsay was a philosophy major. When we met, he was at the tail end of his senior year and I had one more to go. He was forever mumbling about some paper he was writing on the Marquis de Sade and something about Adorno and that funny math guy Leibniz and Rorty Rorty Rorty, the subject of his senior thesis. Who was this Rorty character and how could he be important if he was still alive? I was so self-involved with my D.H. Lawrence and my Chaucer that I never even bothered trying to understand what he was doing, just wishing that he'd hurry up and finish it so we could go sit on a roof and drink Carling Black Label and smoke cigarettes.

As we've moved from apartment to apartment to house in NYC, and then to Texas, we've carted most of our college books along with us. I know a lot of former college students get rid of their college books but we are in harmony on this point so neither calls the other out on it: "Why do we still have the Penguin Classic Boethius and the Norton Critical everything?" he never asks me. "Why do we have Quine's Word and Object and Heidegger's Basic Writings?" I never ask him. We are in silent agreement. When we are in our 80s and finally go back to get those doctorates we always meant to get, we'll have our dog-eared volumes strewn with barely decipherable marginalia at the ready.

We are not the only ones who cherish this dream. We went to an estate sale a while back that felt like a college bookstore going-out-of-business sale that happened to be held in a suburban tract house with a manicured square of lawn and a windmill out front. This guy had saved everything excellent, including lots of my beloved Modern Library books and vintage Signet paperbacks, and, surprise, surprise—Richard Rorty's Objectivity, Relativism and Truth. Lindsay snapped it up and tucked it under his arm. "Wait," I said. "You have that book." This I knew because I am the packer and unpacker of books. "No, I don't!" he said. "You're probably just mixing it up with Contingency Irony and Solidarity." I must've raised an eyebrow. "So what if I do have it? I'll send this copy to Jon" (a fellow philosophy major who went on to philosophy grad school and may well have his own copy of Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, though I think he was anti-Rorty, not that I know what that means). I looked at him like he was crazy and he went defensive: "I just want it, alright?"

Okay, I let it go. It's not rational. I hesitate to use such a loaded term in this context, especially as an irrational former English major, but it's not. The book is not rare or out-of-print. It's not expensive, or leather-bound or autographed. It's a book he already has, but it represents a past life, a familiar face unexpectedly bobbing up in a crowd. It's a nice feeling, right? And crikey, for just 25¢ what's the harm?