Booking It
Cruising, looking at houses in the middle of the night. I’m sitting in the backseat to the left. My parents are arguing about where we’re going. All the houses we pass sit very close to the road and almost all are on sharp curves. I tell them the place we’re headed is flooded and trashed but they don’t hear me or don’t care. Once we arrive, it’s obvious there isn’t any electricity and we leave the doors open and light candles to see by. There is now an older couple with us.
We begin digging and making piles of stuff we want to take home. I grab a very old book and study it. It was originally published in 1815 but this printing is from 1821. The cover is clay or similar and embossed or etched with red details and a man’s portrait. Most pages have numbers handwritten in blue ink at the bottom and there are hastily scrawled notes in the margins. The book is in a dark red/maroon wrap made of either leather or soft canvas, about twice the size of the actual book, ties hanging from the right flap meant to keep it shut. I think the ties are too stiff to use without snapping. Someone had written on the wrap — more numbers, I think — but it’s long since worn away. I know that it’s worth at least $1,000 because I’m familiar with the first edition, so I carry it with me into the front room. The old man with us recognizes it and says that that copy wouldn’t go for less than $4,000 and that he would buy it off me right there before mentioning that it could be worth as much as $7,000. I turn him down and hold onto it until we leave.
— February 17, 2011
A couple things worth noting: This was at the height of my family’s Pawn Stars addiction, and (unrelated) I had become obsessed with finding my mother’s copy of Night Shift, convinced it was a first edition. I never was able to flush it out.