Recent purchases

[erilaz]

Yr Hobyd — O'r diwedd! The first Welsh translation of The Hobbit.

https://nation.cymru/culture/yr-hobyd-t ... -in-welsh/

[Zunu]

^ It's all Sindarin to me!

[erilaz]

It's Vintage Paper Fair time again! I spent over 6½ hours rummaging through thousands of postcards. In the end, I bought 41 cards but only paid a total of $15 for the lot. Most of the cards I bought were priced at 25 cents apiece, but here are a couple of my $1 cards:



The card with the Russian (?) woman is unused but dated 1916. The dunce cat was mailed from Oil City, PA, to Kinsman, OH, in 1907.

While I was in San Francisco, I also picked up a couple of records at Amoeba Music on Haight: a used LP of Wild Animal by Vanity (in pristine condition) and a used double LP of Alles von Karl Valentin und Liesl Karlstadt, which was in the world music clearance bin for only $1.99.

[erilaz]

Today I received an eBay lot of various Esperanto items from the archives of Forrest J Ackerman, whose name should be familiar to any serious sci-fi nerds out there. One of the items is a postcard sent to Ackerman in 1938 by someone with the nickname Covonjo. I did some research and identified Covonjo as Celia Winnick, who later led an Esperanto group at the Baha'i Center in Los Angeles.




Also in the lot were drafts of two letters that Ackerman wrote in Esperanto in 1935, when he was only 19 but clearly very active in the Esperanto and science fiction communities.

[erilaz]

Himawarikai's monthly used Japanese book sale was today, and since my Spidey-sense was urging me to go, I went and of course found some amazing stuff. First the books:



「世界のカブトムシ・クワガタムシ」A full-color guide to lots of different kinds of beetles, especially stag beetles. Too cool to pass up.
「五月三十五日」Japanese translation of Der 35. Mai by Erich Kästner, which I read in the original German years ago.
「はてしない物語」Japanese translation of Die unendliche Geschichte by Michael Ende, which I likewise read in the original German years ago. The one copy of this gorgeous slipcased hardcover edition that's offered for sale on Amazon.co.jp is priced at ¥6780 and won't ship to the U.S.

They usually have some DVDs and a few CDs at this sale, but this was the first time I've ever seen vinyl there. They didn't have a lot, but I grabbed half a dozen seven-inch singles and EPs that looked promising:



Yamaguchi Momoe's "Rock 'n' Roll Widow" is a cool song that I was familiar with, so I was especially happy to find that 45. Like that one, most of these records aren't worth a lot, but the Eri Chiemi record sells for $17–18 on Discogs. I have a few other Godiego 45s, but this picture disc seems to be rather rare: it's never sold on Discogs, and I couldn't find anyone currently selling it on Discogs, eBay, or Yafuoku. And yes, that is an actual autograph on the Kobayashi Sachiko record!

All the books and all the records were 50 cents each.

Another great thing about this sale is that I get to practice my conversational Japanese. The old Japanese ladies running the sale were pretty amazed when I pulled the word 蓄音機 out of the dark corners of my memory.

[erilaz]

Vintage Paper Fair again! 27 postcards for $47, a fairly typical mix for the most part. Here's a cute one priced at 50¢:



I don't usually find Esperanto postcards at this show, but a new dealer had FOUR, priced at 50¢ and $1 each. Better yet, she had a card written in VOLAPÜK! Even though I already had a postcard of this design and four cards written by the same person, I would have paid $20 without flinching. But the price was only fifty cents!