Been neglecting to mention this but as I get eBay experience with selling off various closet-clutterers, before tackling the Really Big Job of the foul papers, I'm now doing what I said I'd be doing, selling off various foreign translations, paired with American or British editions of the same book, for language students and for the more eccentric or completist sort of collector. I've listed about half of them so far, with more to come in the next couple of weeks (I like to set them up mostly as ten-day auctions spanning two weekends, to give people time enough). http://myworld.ebay.com/johnbarnessfwriter if you're curious.
It's also resulted in my getting a lot of very pleasant correspondence from the collector community, which is helping me a great deal in seeing how the issues look to them. I must say, they're awfully nice people. (Or maybe I'm just biased toward people who like my stuff). Still, it's a strange impulse to me; I would dearly love to be able to look at Shakespeare's foul papers, but if I owned them, I'd sell them or donate them to a museum (as long as I'd still have access to them). The good feeling people get from having things in their hands is sort of foreign to me, but clearly very important to the collector community. I wonder if that's some of the source of tension between scholar and collector? The scholar figures that, well, the spine cracked a little, but all the words are still there and the information isn't lost; the collector sees something she treasured that will never be quite the same again. Just imagining that situation tends to pit them against each other.
Hey, writers -- since I know some of you are out there -- how do you feel about paper you've written on? Meh, it's good for cleaning the kitchen floor, or THAT'S MY HEART?
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