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Flower, Fist on eBay (1 Viewer)

nymark

nymark

Did you guys know there was a copy of Flower Fist on eBay right now? Am I behind the 8-ball on this (as usual)? It's a nice copy, too! It doesn't have the usual rusted staples. It's being sold by an organization that helps Polish immigrants!

Item number: 320318174215
 
Yes, but that copy was a presentation copy signed by Buk and inscribed to Al Fogel. The copy on ebay has a few relatively minor issues, so I would think it could make it up to about $2K if there are enough people out there with the $$$ to push it up.
 
I agree with Bill. I think the Friends of Polish Imigrants have no idea whatsoever what they have on their hands. Should be interesting.

I almost hope anyone but Him is the winning bidder. He certainly has AT LEAST one copy and it seems so piggish and greedy to buy another. Let someone else feel the joy of ownership!
 
Yup, there really is no need to bother with this one, or THAT one, or ANYONE for that matter, unless you want to see how much Stnick will be paying for this particular copy.
In which case, I kinda do. I like seeing his funds being siphoned out. More and more and more. Sick? I haven't decided yet.
Every time Scott(or somebody else for that matter) uploads a page's worth of new Bukowski material, it's a page's worth of what 95% us can't afford, or WON'T afford, quite simply because there's someone out there willing to pay 4 x's more than what it's really worth.

Anyway, I have a feeling "Flower.." will be going for more than 2 grand.
 
I can't wait for the last 5 minutes of the auction/fight.
That's when it starts getting interesting and the fists start flying.
Then the buyer's remorse starts settling in, when they receive their monthly credit card statement.
That's when the tears start flowing and the back starts aching.
 
I popped a $500 bid in. Just in case the Bukowski collecting world disappeared the instant I made the bid... Sadly, it was not to be.

Jerks...
 
nymark said:
It's being sold by an organization that helps Polish immigrants!
Click to expand...

In a strange sort of way this seems very fitting considering that the name "Bukowski" is fairly common in Poland...:)
 
A nice looking copy. They started it at $49 so they must have known it has some value, otherwise they would have started at $5 or $10. But they may not realize how high it will go.
 
Now that I think about it, they probably knew they had something special on their hands. They took detailed pics and wrote a fairly sophisticated description. Perhaps they were even aware that most copies have rusted staples. Why else include a pic of the binding?!
 
Well, insurance is part of the mailing
options on the Auction.

Personally, I can't afford the 11 dollars insurance,
they are asking, let alone the blood letting the book
is currently fetching. . .

But hey. The wonderful carefree life of writers, eh? ;)
 
My timing is always shitty on these things. But that's probably why all my copies of the really rare books (okay, almost all of them) are "good" or "ex libris" copies I got for a fraction of what a "fine" copy would cost. We just dropped a big chuck of change on a couple of paintings so I'm sadly going to have to watch this one go to saint Nick. Or, if the planets align, someone else.

The only early books I don't have are this one and Longshot Pomes.

Oh, and Poems And Drawings, Run With The Hunted, Confessions Of A Man Insane Enough To Live With Beasts, The Genius Of The Crowd and All The Assholes In The World And Mine. Just those. ;)

In case you are Christmas shopping.
 
It makes me feel better than I haven't been able to afford all those rare ones in my first two years of collecting, knowing that you don't have them too. Also, it can make for a good collecting competition...
 
Not surprised. Honestly... I could have maxed out my credit. But I doubt it would have been worth it.

Good news for the Polish, however.
 
I miss the good old days when you could see every bidder's IDs, and check out other items they'd bought. There wasn't any privacy, but it was a wealth of information.

By the way, I agree with whoever said the Polish Ladies knew what they were doing with this item. There was nothing amatuer about that listing. Pretty good price in this lousy market.
 
Rekrab said:
I miss the good old days when you could see every bidder's IDs, and check out other items they'd bought.
Click to expand...

Yeah. You're definitely right on that!

You could find a lot of buyers, sellers, items that way. And check out peoples reputation and ways of bidding. Those were the days.
 
Oh sure, why not? I'd like to go back to 2002 or so (Known to anthropologists as the pre stnickl/dermaface era) when there were a dozen different poem manuscripts up for auction almost continually for a year and a half. Those were good old days for sure.
 
Yesterday, a well-established West Coast book dealer posted a copy of FLOWER, FIST to abebooks.com for $4,000. Does anyone want to bet it's the same one that sold on eBay two weeks ago? What makes him think someone will now pony up DOUBLE what it just sold for? It defies logic.
 
That seems... a bit low if that is the case. It may even be worth that much, but to buy something on eBay just to double its price and sell it yourself...
 
Well, Booksellers sometimes have good luck doing this.

Once I tried to sell a copy of the big white book. I listed it and listed it, without luck (i listed it three times). The final time I think that I asked $1200. Two weeks later someone paid twice that from a bookseller's catalog.

I think that a lot of it is about contacts and high end booksellers seem to have a disregard for ebay.

Bill
 
Bill, you're right on that. Some collectors will pay a high end dealer many times what they would pay getting the same book on eBay. Maybe it's a matter of trust -- knowing the signatures are real, for example -- or maybe there's an element of snobbism at work.
 
This seller is back with another copy for sale.

http://cgi.ebay.com/Flower-Fist-and...286.c0.m14&_trkparms=66:2|65:10|39:1|240:1318

There are some things in the list that are very troubling to me.

1) according to the photos, this is the exact same copy that they "sold" a couple weeks ago. Skyline Books was the buyer of that last copy, so you know that the sale went through and that it was legit enough to pass muster with someone like Skyline.

2) They mention that they have an inscribed copy in their "library" and have sold other copies of this book. How many do they have? I know that the publisher was very tight with copies of this and that Buk had a tough time getting a copy for the guy who illustrated the cover.

Something does not smell right.

p.s. In true bookseller fashion, the book is now listed on Abe for $4000, which is nearly twice what they just paid for it two weeks ago. I'm all for sellers buying for less than they sell for and understand that they need to turn a profit, but if the book sells at a public auction for $2210, then that is what it is worth. This was not a book dealer only auction, it was open to the public, which is a damn fine way to set the real value of an item, especially now that this second one is on the block. This second sale, when averaged with the first would be a good judge of the actual value at this time. The thing is that I would not be at all surprised if they got the $4000 for this from someone.



Looking at it again, it seems that the numbers on the title page, although identical are in fact in different places, so these appear to be two different books, which does not ease my mind yet. There is still seems to be something very odd here.

Bill
 
Might those pencil numbers be a call number, such as used to catalog books in a library? This seems odd. The only books I've ever seen with call numbers have in fact been ex-library copies. I didn't take the time to check out the number against known systems such as Dewey Decimal, etc.

Added: well, duh, they say "our library." Ignore me...
 
Yes it seemed quite odd to me that they had at LEAST two copies of the same book... now, 3. I saw this last night and commented to my wife that something seemed off that such an organization would have so many copies of such a rare book.
 

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