So I was searching for Peanuts books on eBay the other day (an exercise which has gained me a lot of items and cost me a lot of money over the years), and I came across a copy of the leatherbound Easton Press edition of A Charlie Brown Christmas: The Making of a Legend – which is the only print edition of A Charlie Brown Christmas which I know about but do not have. It’s a hundred dollar book, which is a bit beyond where I draw the line… but the bid was only at thirty-some bucks, so I placed a bid for a little over fifty, and went back to my search…
…only to stumble on another copy of the same book, only the person auctioning it off hadn’t listed the words “Easton Press” anywhere in the descriptor, so all the Easton Press collectors had not found it. With a little over a day to go, no one had bid on it. Opening bid was $5. I bid… but not too high, just $21. After all, I was already potentially on the hook for another copy. I crossed my fingers. Alas, with three hours left to go, someone else stumbled across it and bid more, winning the book for a bargain $22. Meanwhile the other auction was still going on, and in the end, a couple people outbid me, at a final price of $61.
So now I’m sitting here kicking myself over not bidding higher on the one I didn’t get. Who knows, I might’ve been able to get it for $30.
Meanwhile, there is still time to place an order through Amazon and get it to where it needs to be before Christmas with free Super Saver Shipping (although I wouldn’t wait much longer). And if it has to be there before Hannukah is over, you can achieve that with the paid shipping options, which are generally no more expensive than heading down to the post office and shipping something yourself. I just got back from the post office – not on a holiday shipment but on Schulz book business, sending a sample volume of Schulz’s Youth to a foreign publisher interested in doing a translation – and the line was indeed long. Skip that line if you can.
Around this time, I always like to take a look at what AAUGH Blog readers have been ordering from Amazon, scouring it for gift ideas. I mean, there’s the obvious things like Peanuts books – Celebrating Peanuts is unsurprisingly the big one of the moment. But there’s a lot of non-Peanuts things too (thank goodness! says the guy who gets the referral fee.) Here are just a few of the things that AAUGH Blog readers (or AAUGH.com visitors, I can’t tell the difference) have ordered in the past month:
- DVDs of the Jimmy Stewart classic Harvey and of the new Star Trek movie.
- A Barack Obama action figure, and one of George W. Bush
- Wii Sports Resort
- Snoopy pajamas
- A Complete Dennis the Menace hardcover (at 83% off, we’ve sold a few)
- A book about the guy who fixed the 1919 World Series
- A 19″ LCD HDTV
- A subscription to Sports Illustrated Kids
- Premier Squirrel Dude Dog Toy (size:medium)
- a bicycle bell
- The Zen of Fundraising
That last reminds me of something that I’m planning to give my 5-year old daughter this year. I’m going to give her the chance to make a choice and a difference: she gets $35 to donate to her choice of a local food bank, an animal rescue, or the local PBS station. I want her to learn about giving to things that need giving to, plant the seeds for later in life.
