When buying stuff from eBay, it often helps to know exactly what you’re buying… because the seller often doesn’t.

Take, for example, this item, which I recently obtained. The auction listing says that it was three books in one! What a great deal! And it’s possible that the seller really believed that. After all, the covers of the individual books were reproduced inside this 64 page staple-bound booklet.

What this is, however, is not these three 200-some page books somehow squished into 64 pages. Instead, this is a preview book; this has short samples from those longer books. A thing like this is usually used to sell bookstores on ordering these books.

I knew it wasn’t three full books in one, wasn’t what the auction claimed it was, but I was fine with that. I’m a collecting completist. I knew what it was, and I wanted it. But goodness knows, I see a ton of eBay listings that are selling first printings that aren’t, Schulz originals that aren’t, toys from 1958 that are really from 1985, and so forth. Don’t trust the sellers to know what they’re talking about… or to be honest about it when the do know.

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