Working from home today, but its kind of a drab, dreary day and very uninspiring to get much of anything accomplished. I'm only half way through Vanity Fair with only eight days to go, so that's the only motivation I have today.



Got a lightning fast turnaround from abebooks.com on four Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories volumes, which I think I ordered on Friday night and they showed up yesterday. Although the guy gouged a little bit on shipping, the books were so cheap it more than made up for it. For some reason this series, consisting of I think 25 books and published in the early '90's, is ridiculously difficult to find, and the later numbers are going for $15 and up. Even eBay doesn't list many of them (plus the title is so convoluted it makes it hard to search for it). I've been able to find a few at conventions in the last few years, but both the most recent Readercon and Boskone turned up zilch, not even ones I already had. So abebooks seemed like a good alternative, although it takes a little cross-referencing to figure out who to buy from. I bought two a couple of months ago from two different dealers. One actually sent me the wrong book, one that he had listed for even more money than the one I wanted, but since I didn't have it that was no problem (for me, anyway). To find four of them from the same dealer for a total of $10 (plus shipping) was extremely unusual, even for the low-numbered ones that are a little more common and not as expensive. They were generally in better shape than I expected, too. Five or six years back I set about to find all the Ballantine Best Of's, of which I think there are 21, and within about two years just going to conventions I found them all, some in better shape than others, some overpriced, some underpriced, but not particularly difficult, and I still seem them fairly frequently. For some reason, though, this Asimov series is a tough customer, I would assume partly because not nearly as many of them were printed. Much like how specific comics of the '70's are much easier to find than comics from the '90's because they printed about 10 times as many of them back then. So now I have 12 of the 25, albeit mostly the more prevalent ones. One of the books in this latest batch was the illusive #7 covering stories from 1945, which includes 2 Retro-Hugo nominees I've been missing, so that page should be getting an update soon, too.