Field Reports/Aug 2017
· Callander, ON
The Callander Box Lot
Recovered
Twelve dollars for a banana box. One book worth keeping, and a lesson about buying the container rather than the contents.
Not a cache. A flea market, which the Society maintains is the same discipline conducted indoors.
Twelve dollars for a banana box, sight mostly unseen, on the grounds that the top layer was Reader's Digest condensed volumes and nobody stacks the good ones on top. This is a real heuristic and it has paid for itself several times.
Underneath: eleven more condensed volumes, a 1974 auto club road atlas that has since become genuinely useful, and a 1939 Knopf first-issue The Big Sleep with a water-damaged lower corner and no jacket. Catalogued as No. 0063.
The damage is real and the book is not valuable. It is, however, the only Chandler in the collection acquired for under a dollar by any reasonable allocation of the twelve, and it opens flat, which a collector's copy would not.
The atlas went to the field shelf. The condensed volumes went back to the same table the following month, which we consider a closed loop rather than a defeat.