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rec.collecting.books.moderated
If I may wax slightly self-important for a moment, I do believe one of
the reasons this group has gone downhill is that I stopped acting as "Bad Cop" when I moved into my new house and changed ISPs several months ago. As many old-timers may remember, I used to post the "NO FS" message quite frequently. I also warned every spammer about the FAQ, and reported every repeat spammer to their ISP (and eBay, where applicable). After a while, I got tired of warning idiots who tried to argue back, dispensed with the warning entirely, and went into "silent assassin" mode by reporting spammers upon the first offense (and many persistant trolls upon subsequent offenses). I have no doubt that this helped reduce the overall noise of the group. Frankly. since the move I've been too busy to do all of that. I've been selling books on TomFolio, through my website, and eBay. writing a lot of paying non-fiction (including several reviews with Howard Waldrop on Locus Online), and just generally not posting to Usenet. When you come right down to it, Usenet Simply Isn't Important. At best it can be a slightly more productive use of your time than watching TV or playing video games. At it's worst it leaches time from doing actually productive tasks. But all that said, if someone creates rec.collecting.books.moderated, I will agree to moderate it. I will be a kind and benevolent diety for those who obey the FAQ, and a terrible god of wrath for those transgress it... |
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#3
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wrote in message
oups.com... If I may wax slightly self-important for a moment, I do believe one of the reasons this group has gone downhill is that I stopped acting as "Bad Cop" when I moved into my new house and changed ISPs several months ago. Oh please, the troubles haven't anything to do with FS ads (which are few). You would be the last person (no pun intended) I would choose to moderate anything. You have already proven yourself heavy-handed, intolerant and vindictive - we may as well let adumbs or palmjob be the moderator! -- Bob Finnan http://bobfinnan.com |
#4
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#5
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"John Pelan" wrote in message
... Scott nailed one of the problems in his OP: Many of us are collectors in a fairly narrow specialty and tend not to post much on general subjects. If William posts an essay on a particularly fascinating associational item of convertiana, I'm certainly going to read it, but I'm very unlikely to have anything to offer to continue the thread. By the same token, I won't have much to offer when Bob posts something informative on series books. I suspect that this holds true for many here; there's a general love of books that brings us all here, but the areas of specialty are so different that it's unlikely that anything but a very generic is going to have a lot of people chiming in. John, there is truth in this notion--but it's not the whole story. Personally, I try to find something of interest in most serious posts--perhaps my collecting interest is such that it allows for cross pollination more easily (because the converts I'm interested in are everywhere): Is the subject classical music? (Fritz Kreisler). Jazz? (Dave Brubeck). Sculpture? (Frederick Hart.) Classic detective fiction? (G.K. Chesterton). Ghost stories? (Russell Kirk). Modern conservative thought? (Ditto). Harlem Renaissance? (Claude McKay). California history? (Peter Burnett). Transcendentalism? (Orestes Brownson). Modern philosophy? (G.E.M. Anscombe). Mathematics? (John von Neumann). Decadence? (Take your pick: Wilde, Beardsley, Huysman). And so on. But perhaps more importantly, as John Carter reminds us, successful book collecting requires not only "taste" (knowing what to collect) but "technique" (knowing how to collect). Technique can cut across our various specialties--and I think you'll find that that is what keeps many of the longer threads going. So I've learned a lot here--even for my own collecting--by reading about collecting in other specialties. William M. Klimon http://www.catholicbookcollector.com BTW: John, congrats on the nice remarks from Michael Dirda, one of my favorite critics: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Oct28.html |
#6
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If anyone wants to join an ever-so-slightly moderated group about the Hardy
Boys and all subjects pertaining thereto, my Hardy Boys group has over 400 members and no flames. You don't have to join to read the archives but only members can post: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HardyBoys/ -- Bob Finnan http://bobfinnan.com |
#7
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On Sun, 12 Dec 2004 17:47:12 -0500, "William M. Klimon"
wrote: "John Pelan" wrote in message .. . Scott nailed one of the problems in his OP: Many of us are collectors in a fairly narrow specialty and tend not to post much on general subjects. If William posts an essay on a particularly fascinating associational item of convertiana, I'm certainly going to read it, but I'm very unlikely to have anything to offer to continue the thread. By the same token, I won't have much to offer when Bob posts something informative on series books. I suspect that this holds true for many here; there's a general love of books that brings us all here, but the areas of specialty are so different that it's unlikely that anything but a very generic is going to have a lot of people chiming in. John, there is truth in this notion--but it's not the whole story. Personally, I try to find something of interest in most serious posts--perhaps my collecting interest is such that it allows for cross pollination more easily (because the converts I'm interested in are everywhere): Is the subject classical music? (Fritz Kreisler). Jazz? (Dave Brubeck). Sculpture? (Frederick Hart.) Classic detective fiction? (G.K. Chesterton). Ghost stories? (Russell Kirk). Modern conservative thought? (Ditto). Harlem Renaissance? (Claude McKay). California history? (Peter Burnett). Transcendentalism? (Orestes Brownson). Modern philosophy? (G.E.M. Anscombe). Mathematics? (John von Neumann). Decadence? (Take your pick: Wilde, Beardsley, Huysman). And so on. But perhaps more importantly, as John Carter reminds us, successful book collecting requires not only "taste" (knowing what to collect) but "technique" (knowing how to collect). Technique can cut across our various specialties--and I think you'll find that that is what keeps many of the longer threads going. So I've learned a lot here--even for my own collecting--by reading about collecting in other specialties. William M. Klimon http://www.catholicbookcollector.com BTW: John, congrats on the nice remarks from Michael Dirda, one of my favorite critics: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2004Oct28.html William: Thanks for the congrats! Ii feel very gratified to have a hand in getting all of Russell Kirk's stories back into print. You are quite right in saying that "technique" crosses all aspects of collecting and there's much to learn from our combined experiences. To wander off entirely (and to test this theorem) I'll mention one of my techniques that I don't believe I've seen mentioned on here for quite some time. My area of speciality runs to what I call "fantastic fiction", covering the rather broad areas of supernatural fiction and science fiction. I'm always on the lookout for works that have eluded the standard references such as Bleiler and have found the technique of examining publishers catalogs to be very fruitful. Chances are good that if a publisher published one book in my area of interest, they probably issued similar titles. Taking one fairly obscure publisher as an example (Henry Drane, Drane's Danegeld) and knowing that they had published several volumes of interest I began checking the extensive catalogues in volumes that otherwise had absolutely no interest to me and discovered several interesting supernatural titles that escaped the notice of the standard references, Another publisher of interest (and here's where cross-pollination comes in) was Rider (an imprint of Hutchinson's). Seemingly anything that hinted of metaphysics was of interest to the folks at Rider so that their books included novels such as H.B. Gregory's DARK SANCTUARY ( a Lovecraftian novel from a Christian perspective) and pretty straight forward scholarly works as well as an astonishing lot of Theospohical psycho-babble. As most of Rider's printings were comparitively tiny and their warehouse was destoryed in the Blitz, there's a pretty fair chance that I'll turn up a couple of books of interest sooner or later. Cheers, John www.darksidepress.com |
#8
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John, that's excellent advice! But have
you ever simply "dropped in" to the publisher's warehouse? Some small and some not so small outfits have little retail outlets, unadvertised, attached. I've picked up some lovely items heavilly discounted at the Dover warehouse store which is about a half hour's drive from my home. --Dave Conford |
#9
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#10
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Scot Kamins wrote:
Dave, It would really be great if you'd quote a few lines from the article to which you're responding so that folks could have a context for your reply. Because of the way that Usenet propagation works, you can never be sure that people have already seen the article to which you're responding. Absolutely. Dave, you appear mysteriously in the "Now Here's a Collectible Proof!" saying, apparently in response to a posting by Bob Reidel: To Bob F: Please give me SOME credit. A check of other posts in the thread shows that you are probably saying this in response to Bob Finnan's comment that you must be a Republican, but when I saw your comment I did not realise that and was merely mystified. To make things clear, you need to post your reply to the person who made the comment, and you need to include enough of their original comment to make the context clear to other users. Anyway, welcome to rec.collecting.books! -- John http://rarebooksinjapan.com |
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