Comments on: Add to Cart

By: D.A. Sachs

D.A. Sachs — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 06:24:33 +0000

If these are prices of books available online, they don’t represent the amounts that works of
poetry command; they are the prices of books that dealers have not been able to sell.
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By: Emily Warn

Emily Warn — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:42:41 +0000

Hi Major,
How deep into economics did you get? I have never studied it, but obviously feel no qualms about hazarding an opinion. In this case, I think the web scrambled supply and demand theories. It did create more sellers and so more supply, but simultaneously created many more buyers and many more opportunities to market the goods, so the prices went up. But I’ll check in with a rare book dealer I know to see if I’ve got my facts straight.
And, yes, for me, Keats’ first book is more valuable than all of Hemingway.
Emily
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By: Major

Major — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 13:12:11 +0000

Hi Emily,
I have not studied economics in some time, but I thought many sellers would lower the cost of rare items rather than inflate prices. Still, that Keats seems like a steal. Are you insinuating Hemingway is less valuable than Keats?
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By: Emily Warn

Emily Warn — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 02:13:01 +0000

Hey, Major,
Thanks for this fantasy collecting trip. From what I understand, online rare booksellers have inflated the cost of these books, partly the result of so many people jumping into the business because it was easy to do.
These prices seem much more expensive than they were ten years ago. And all over the place. I just searched and sorted on “poetry,” too, and discovered an “Extremely Rare First Edition of Keats’s Poems” is selling for $125,000, far below the ten poems and three stories by Hemingway, which is going for $225,000.
Emily
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By: Major

Major — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 15:53:40 +0000

Hi Campbell. September 9th. I am excited to see you in a few days.
John, an even greater gift than Steven’s art collection, a poem! Thank you.
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By: Campbell McGrath

Campbell McGrath — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:42:23 +0000

When is your birthday?
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By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 12:40:25 +0000

Hi, Major– While I can’t score any of the books you’ve listed, I can give you the book I’ve written about here for your upcoming birthday. Happy Birthday!
A Book of Matches
Ephemera hardly worth noticing
until a man lights a woman’s cigarette,
writes a phone number on it,
puts it in his pocket.
Then it becomes part of a story,
a detail remembered about a certain time,
a certain place.
Whoever opens this book expects
a brilliant beginning, a consuming plot,
and a tossed-off ending:
a man may be sitting at a bar,
staring for a long time at a matchbook
next to his glass before absent-mindedly
picking it up.
Here the author perhaps tells us
the matchbook becomes a door, the way
everyday objects sometimes open up
and allow us to wander deep
within ourselves.
Anyone else sees the cover with some
advertisement, which he untucks
and retucks behind the sand striking bar:
did anyone actually go back to
the World’s Most Romantic Restaurant—
Shangri-La in Sisseton, South Dakota,
Learn Basic Computer Programming at Home
and become one of the Experienced Men
Earning $7-12K Per Year,
or see Bill and Fay at Southside Pool Hall
in Caldere, Kansas, You’ll Like Their Beer?
Opening the cover, he finds stapled inside
two rows of ten matches—dipped red
phosphorous heads, cardboard tinders
and handles—that can be torn out of the book
to strike, followed by the familiar scratch
and sizzle in the dark, the comforting small glow
inside a cupped hand.
Twenty little tales to tell, he imagines.
Each one beginning a story: one to light
a joint an old high school buddy offers,
one to illuminate a forking path
on a moonless mountain, another to light
a candle beside a bed where his lover waits.
Not the light of a firefly, a star,
the eye of a cat, but the spark of something
just as brilliant, something
that makes him feel
there is no match like love.
John Blackard
http://www.johnablackard.com
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