market forces: resalers; son of fad

I don't share xerlome's attitude to "resalers" ... I'm quite happy not
to chase around "thrifts" which in any case never seemed to have had
anything worth looking at. I've very happy for the bookseller's scouts
to have risen early on Saturday mornings and rummaged through all the
stuff at school fetes so that I can browse in a shop after lunch on
Saturday.

Sometimes the resalers have gone to extraordinary lengths to enable me
to purchase in comfort at a good price. One example: I was able to buy
off ebay.fr a copy of "Brattahlid" by Nörlund and Stenberger [1934, vol
88 no 1 of the Danish journal Meddelelser om Grønland -- 160 pages of
fascinating archeological report in English on excavations at the
homestead of Eric the Red]. It appeared to be an isolated
drop-from-the-sky occurrence and the seller evidently knew little about
what it was, so I asked where he got it, were there similar/related
books available from the same source, etc. Turns out he was a
photographer who had been involved in a magazine article on the art of
dumpster-diving in the affluent suburbs of Paris and was now
supplementing his income using the lessons learned.

What does annoy me though is when a book near the top of the want-list
is vacuumed up by a derivative fad and doesn't seem to be available
anywhere. An example: "The Saga of King Heidrek the Wise", London:
Nelson, 1960 -- an interesting saga, with parallel text in English
and Old Icelandic for the benefit of students thereof. What attracts the
fadsters? The bit where it says "Edited and translated by Christopher
T*****n".