Category: My Ramblings!

Here’s how old I am: I grew up with exactly nine TV channels — and none of them ran 24 hours a day.

And trust me — nine stations was plenty. I was in big-city Chicago, after all — a major media market. My VHF lineup covered the basics: ABC, CBS, NBC, and PBS. Then came the two UHF channels, 32 and 44. I won’t bore you with the technical differences between VHF and UHF (ask ChatGPT if you’re curious), but trust me: UHF was where the cool stuff aired.

Channel 32 showed old reruns: Batman and The Little Rascals and The Munsters and Get Smart! But 44? 44 was sacred. Because Sunday mornings in the 1970s meant only one thing on every channel except 44: church. Seriously, every station was full of people praying and priests mumbling Latin and handing out communion. Except Channel 44…and Bob Luce Wrestling. I never missed Sunday Morning wrestling.

Sometimes tuning in meant wrapping foil around the rabbit ears just to kill the snow and static and to minimize “ghosts”. Bob Luce brought cigar-chomping Dick the Bruiser, his tag partner The Crusher! Baron Von Raschke and his “claw”! Big Cat Ernie Ladd and his thumb! Moose Cholak! Ox Baker!

Luce wasn’t just a promoter — he was a ringmaster in a plaid sport coat. His shows jumped from grainy locker-room rants to shaky in-ring chaos, always hyping “the wildest card of the century” at the International Amphitheatre. (Remind me to tell you about the time the roof caved in there during the Ice Follies.) Like all great promoters, Luce didn’t sell wrestling. He sold spectacle. Good versus Evil. And for a Chicago kid glued to 44 every Sunday, there was nothing like it. The only thing I hated? When they’d suddenly “run out of time” and end the show mid-match.

And why didn’t I beg my dad take me to the International Amphitheatre for Luce’s live shows? It’s a question that baffles me to this day. I guess it just never crossed my mind.

I quit paying attention sometime around The Rock, Stone Cold, Hulk Hogan as heel and what would be the end of Bischoff’s fantastic WCW run. But wrestling’s always stuck with me. Always. These days, I use vintage wrestling imagery as source material for my art. So when Dom Vitalli from Phoenix Championship Wrestling offered me a ringside spot to shoot pictures for his local league, guess who showed up two hours early with a couple of cameras hanging around my neck just to hang backstage with the wrestlers.

Let’s just say I was way more excited for tag teams, body oil, and shaved men than I should’ve been.

So, here’s the thing. In my last rambling, I took a very cheap shot at A.A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young. I joked it was about as collectible as a used coloring book. And while that line still makes me chuckle a bit (I try to avoid laughing at my own jokes) — I’ve had a change of heart.

Because the more I sat with that book, the more I realized: it is something. I could find maybe six or seven copies online — total. Before the internet (does anyone remember AB Bookman’s Weekly?!), tracking down this book would’ve been really difficult. And when you actually read it — when you feel the illustrated cloth boards, take a good look at Ernest Shepard’s illustrations, or how about that Christopher Robin frontispiece?! — it is special.

Nope, it’s not a first. And it’s certainly not pristine. But so what? It’s nearly a hundred years old, and it’s survived wars, floods, a child’s careless hands, and who knows how many house moves. Maybe it’s not “collectible” in the formal sense. But it’s charming. It’s vintage. And it still matters.

I think that’s the part I forgot when I penned that blog: sometimes a book’s value isn’t in scarcity, but in how it feels in your hands.

And this one? It may not be rare by some definitions — but unlike a scroll or a screen or a swipe or a JPEG, it’s got weight, texture, that wonderful, slight scent of a used book…and a whole lotta Soul.

Look, I’ve made worse decisions.

I’ve bought more than one book that wasn’t a true first. I remember pulling a near fine, beautiful clothbound For Whom The Bell Tolls—its bright, unread spine screaming at me from a thrift store shelf during my early collecting days—only to later discover it lacked that Scribner’s “A”… and a dust jacket. Still, I skipped out of there thinking I’d scored.

Or, on the flip side, there was the time I bought a handful of letters (well, more like short, typewritten notes signed in ink) from William S. Burroughs to the editor of a tiny, obscure little magazine. The editor handed them to me and asked, “Can you give me $140 for the lot?”

This was 1997. I was part of a collective of booksellers in a San Francisco shop called Tall Stories, in the Mission District. I looked over the final Burroughs note while considering the price. It read something like (and I’m paraphrasing here): soon, the last pygmy three-toed sloth will be blasted into extinction from its tree by a white hunter wielding his shotgun.

Do me a favor and read that last line again — this time imitating Burroughs’ flat, nasal, sonorous delivery.

“Yes, I’ll take them.”

After The Editor left, I priced my six letters at $280—double my money!—and slipped them into the store’s shared glass case. Not long after, Alan Milkerit, a real bookman who’d been teaching me the ropes, walked in and noticed something amiss in the case. He looked closer. He opened the case and snapped my letters up. Then he tossed three $100 bills on the counter and said to me, sternly, “Haven’t I taught you anything yet, boy?”

Fast forward to my latest gaffe: A.A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young. Yeah. I should’ve done a little homework. In my defense, it looked like something. I was on one of those lesser-known auction sites, thinking, this one’s being overlooked—especially since the listing and its description didn’t even mention “Winnie the Pooh.” But no edition check, no online comps, and was it originally issued in a jacket? (Yes, it was.) In the end, I went with a hunch and twenty bucks.

Turns out the auction house doesn’t describe books very well, either; which means mine might be as collectible as a used coloring book. (Okay… just a little more.)

We’ve all got blind spots. Mine, apparently, are English nursery rhymes. And the less-trafficked auction sites.

More soon—assuming I don’t fall for a mid-grade Babar next.

Everyone likes a story about a live show, so here’s one for you. I saw Mike Peters play solo on the Sunset BLVD sometime around 2009. Tiny bar wedged between the Whisky and the Rainbow. Might’ve been called Cat Club  — I can’t recall. Cause there’s nothing better than aging! What I do recall is how good he was. And there couldn’t have been more than 30 of us in the audience.

I’ll say this, too: I was never a big fan of The Alarm. Too close to U2, if you ask me. Or, as Harold Bloom called it: “The Anxiety of Influence.” But if you were listening to the radio or watching MTV in 1983 — which we all were — you couldn’t avoid “68 Guns”.

OK, so I just Goooogled Mike Peters Cat Club shows and it was the Cat Club, and he played three consecutive Fridays for the month of April to celebrate his 50th birthday: the 3rd, 10th, 17th. I can’t recall which one I went to. But I do recall this like it was just the other day: at one point, he asked the room if anyone had a request. I asked him to play the one song that influenced him the most.

He grinned and played London Calling by The Clash. (Photo credit here.)

Mike Peters passed recently — 29 April 2025. A little over 16 years to the day after my Cat Club Show Story.

His acoustic version of London Calling was amazing.

And cancer fucking sucks.

I found four of these “Hot Rod Jargon” leaflets buried in a box at a flea. What drew me in was the art. Tom Medley. Dunno him. But a very cool drawing of a dude on a motorized contraption. Then I see Capitol Records. I know them. Hip-Daddy-Cat dragster lingo on one side, Beach Boys / Dick Dale pimping hot rod records on the other. Single sheet, folded into fourths. No price. No comps. No clue. So I do what we all do when we’re flying blind—I buy them all and, a few years later, throw one online.

It sells immediately.

I list a second priced a little higher, JFF (just for fun). Gone so fast I think it’s the email notifying me of the first one sold. Also that first buyer is offering me $25 for the one that just sold for $30.

Blown Gassers, Nurds, Haulin’ Henrys &  Rail-jobs! 

Now I’m down to two. What are they worth!? There’s no record of sales. No listings. But here’s what I do know: It’s pure crossover gold—pop music marketing, drag racing, vintage ephemera, and that perfect why would anyone save this? thang going on.

So what do I price the last two at?

Dunno yet — but I sure am having fun figuring it out.

I’ve got a xeroxed copy of a section from The Cultures of Collecting, published by Harvard University Press and edited by John Elsner and Roger Cardinal. I wish I could remember how I got it. It’s just ten pages, stapled together — the ten pages that are Jean Baudrillard’s essay “The System of Collecting.” In it, he argues that collecting is less about the object and more about “the system” — the logic behind your collection and the structure it gives your life.

Top things to collect these days? Sports cards. Vintage toys. Action figures. Comic books. And, of course, “vinyl records.” But I digress.

The essay stuck with me. If you’re a collector, it might stick with you, too. Because I didn’t just collect comic books or beer cans or modern first editions or records or amateur snapshots. Baudrillard says we collect the moments around them. And he’s right: the crate-digging. The too-early flea market mornings. The vendors. The dealers. The bookstores, record stores, antique malls. The very specific memory of the bookseller who not only sold me Bukowski’s All The Assholes in the World And Mine — but introduced me to chapbooks and little magazines before making the sale. Or, better yet, stumbling into the movie theater on a whim to check out “Barfly” without knowing what it was and coming out and heading straight to a different bookstore to discover Burning in Water Drowning in Flame. Same kinda story for Let It Be by The Replacements. Kiss Alive! Jeff Beck’s Wired. And any rare time you get to handle a Patchen painted book! How about that ditch next to an old Amish covered bridge in Indiana where I found my first — and only — cone top beer can in the wild! Reading Daredevil and Hulk on my Baba’s beach house porch.

But systems change. Lives change. And mine is shifting — from being a buyer to being a seller. That doesn’t mean the system’s gone. Maybe it’s just a different system now. Or maybe I’m just not that excited about the chase anymore. 5am alarms were never OK in my world; now, they simply don’t exist. Maybe it’s all just a function of age?

Let’s face it: most dealers start as collectors. I know that’s the case with me. But don’t get me wrong — I’m not done with any of it. The beautiful books. The records (10 max, Jim…10 max). The super weird snapshots. I’m just more interested now in what happens next.

Letting go has its own kind of satisfaction. And if you’re here, reading this, maybe you already understand that.

Every year I walk into the Armory in New York City for the Antiquarian Book Fair, I enter with the same fantasy you’ve probably had: unlimited funds to buy anything.

The New York Antiquarian Book Fair has become a ritual. I go to see books so rare that—once bought—they disappear. Gone from circulation, often forever. Until, maybe, an estate donates them to a library, or they quietly resurface on the market. Likely to wind up right back at the Armory.

In past years, my imaginary checkbook has picked up a true first edition of Ulysses published by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Co., a signed Catcher in the Rye, and The Genius of the Crowd—that exceedingly scarce Bukowski chapbook printed by da levy, most of which were confiscated by Cleveland police on obscenity charges. One copy I handled a few years ago even came with its original mailing envelope—possibly the only one still in existence with the envelope.

This year, two items had me biting my lip: a beautiful copy of Wallace Berman’s 7th issue of Semina and a fantastic letter written by Charles Bukowski. Berman’s hand-assembled artists’ book won.

Most issues of Semina are nearly impossible to find. All of them are rare. Semina inspired Volta. And the 7th issue was Berman’s most personal—entirely his own work, no outside contributors. And how about that photo of Tosh!?

As for Buk’s letter? Scroll down and tell me it’s not great.

Of course, neither came home with me. But that’s okay.

A small part of collecting is imagining what you’d own if money weren’t an issue. The real joy of book collecting? Knowing books don’t just hold stories—most of the time they are the story.

Here’s a picture I took last night of who is probably the world’s biggest Abbath fan.

Abbath is a Norwegian black metal band, fronted by a man who calls himself Abbath Doom Occulta. He once led another band called Immortal, but they had a very nasty breakup. But I’m not going to make this about that.

And what in the world was I doing at an Abbath show? Let’s not make this about that either—except to say Abbath was part of a three-act opening bill (Cro-Mags, Abbath, and Down) for Danzig. Glenn Danzig. Which is exactly what I was doing at an Abbath show, and whom I enjoy far more as frontman for The Misfits than as a solo act.

But I don’t wanna make this about that.

What I do want to make this about is how much I love Super Fans. Super Fans of any kind—whether or not I’m into the thing they’re into: Deadheads and Hulkamaniacs and Parrotheads and Trekkies and Swifties and Whovians and Beliebers and Potterheads. They’re all terrific in my book. Including members of The Fiend Club, which is the space for Misfits devotees.

And especially this member of Abbath’s Army, who is part of the Trve Kvlt, which makes her a real Corpsepaint Warrior, one of the traveling Blackpackers, proud member of The Northern Horde, and a foot soldier in The Frostbitten Legion.

Super Fans are my people.

Even when they’re not.

You don’t expect to find John Steinbeck under the Big Top. But there he is—in the 1954 edition of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus Magazine & Program—writing a short essay simply titled “Circus”.

It’s tucked between clown bios and ad copy, printed on glossy paper for a quarter. Not in The New Yorker. Not in Harper’s. But in a souvenir program handed out to families watching elephants march in circles. And the thing is—it’s good. Way better than Hemingway’s take from the year before. Steinbeck’s essay didn’t read like he simply accepted an assignment — which is exactly what Hemingway’s felt like. Steinbeck doesn’t glorify the spectacle, either; he honors the labor, the grit, the fading shine behind the scenes. It’s about memory and movement. It feels like something that could’ve shown up in one of his novels.

So why does it matter? Because this forgotten periodical reminds us that literary value isn’t always shelved where we expect it. Sometimes it hides in ephemera. Sometimes the archive is a folding table in the sun at your favorite flea market.

That’s part of the work—being a seller, sure, but also a finder. A rescuer. A re-contextualizer of things left behind — if you can call that “work.”