Books and auctions: a dangerous combination
Oh dear. I seem to have discovered Trade Me (New Zealand’s equivalent to ebay).
I blame PixieKitten. She mentioned in a comment that a friend had got a thousand books for $1 on Trade Me, so of course I had to go and check out such a wondrous potential source of books. And I found three auctions for bulk lots of books (not thousands of books, unfortunately, just tens, but its a start :-)), all with very low starting bids, and all in Christchurch (there’d be no point buying books from outside Christchurch, the postage would cost more than the books are worth!). And I’ve won two of them already! 16 books for $3, and 19 for $5.
The first lot were in Shirley, which is easy to get to by bus from our place, so last night MrPloppy and I went over there and collected them. They turned out to be a very mixed bag of all sorts of odd books:
- Michael Jackson: Unauthorized by Christopher Andersen
- The Killer Mine by Hammond Innes
- The Death of a Smile by Peter Brighton (seems to be a fictionalised account of Princess Diana’s death)
- The Beat to the Beehive by Ross Meurant (which will make a perfect themed release for Wellington!)
- Charlotte’s Secrets by Charlotte Dawson (apparently she’s someone on TV – MrPloppy seemed shocked I had no idea who she is)
- South by Java Head by Alistair Maclean
- Shelly Has a Baby by Shelly West (the book of the TV documentary, which I vaguely remember from years ago, about a severely disabled woman’s fight to have a child)
- Belonging by Isabel Huggan
- The Angelic Game by Lawrence Osborne
- Leviathan by John Gordon Davis
- Grail Quest 4: Voyage of Terror by JH Brennan (one of those horribly complicated choose your own adventure books that require several dice and pen and paper to be able to read)
- Inglês Para Viagem (an English phrase book for Portuguese speakers!)
- The Pimpernel Project by Mary Raymond
- The Spark by Raymond Bowers
- For Love of a Rose by Antonia Ridge (the story of the development of a rose variety)
- No Angel by Penny Vincenzi
Like I said, a mixed bag! As we were sorting through them, MrPloppy and I were having fun trying to work out what combination of family members had previously owned them and why 🙂
After picking up the books, we decided to stop off at The Palms and have some dinner. I remembered that I still had a few pre-numbered labels in my planner left over from Mt Cook, so I picked out one of the books (No Angel) and labelled it up and released it in the cafe when we left. Sometimes pre-numbered labels can really come in handy – I must remember to print off some more before the convention, just in case there’s a bookshelf in the backpackers’ 🙂
Once we got home I spent the rest of the evening registering the rest of the books, so at least I’ve made a start now on getting books together for Wellington. And hopefully we’ll be able to pick up the other lot of books later in the week, which will add to the pile a bit more.
Currently reading: Frangipani by Célestine Hitiura Vaite and A Hat Full of Sky by Terry Pratchett
Currently listening to: Thirteen Steps Down by Ruth Rendell
Hehe, be very careful, Trademe can become addictive! You start with one thing in mind and then you start to wander and find all kinds of things. Glad you’ve done well out of it though. The thousand books may have been a great bargin but we are STILL trying to sort through them all! Know anyone who wants a boxfull of various bibles?
-pk-
*Abandons hope for FutureCat* 🙂
Wow, that certainly is a mixed bag of books!