Say, over here at the Village Voice is a great little essay peripherally about one of my favorite writers, Kurt Vonnegut, but it's really about the collector's mania many of us have, including myself. (I've not come close to getting a complete collection of Vonnegut's wry and witty fiction [and have I mentioned yet we share the same birthday?], although I did track down a copy of the mid-1980s novel "Bluebeard" last week at the used book store.)
"On the Internet, though, epiphanies become prosaic, since nearly anything is within electronic reach," the author writes. I remember 6-7 years ago when I first really started discovering the Internet, and by extension, the wonders of eBay. One of the first things I began hunting for on eBay were the great old Hugh Lofting "Dr. Dolittle" children's books from the 1930s and 1940s, which my Dad loves and I do too. We'd both haunted used book stores for years looking for those things, which were just rare as all get out for some reason. On eBay, I managed to put together a complete set, as did my Dad (even the holy grail, "Dr. Dolittle And The Green Canary"!) in a few months. While it was gratifying as heck to have 'em, in a weird way, having the hunt be over was kind of deflating, too...
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