While waiting for the snow storms that never happened, I've been sorting, cleaning, tossing, arranging and generally making some sort of sense of years of accumulation. For an inveterate collector, that's a tall order.
Periodically, the basement bulkhead doors are opened and bags and boxes are tossed up and out to pile up in ever increasing mounds, waiting to be carried away by my friendly local snow plow guy who, strangely enough, has plenty of time on his hands.
Bags of books head out to local book shops, marking up nice amounts of credit for me to use on some juicy tome that I must have. Other stuff is boxed and waiting for either auction, donation or decision.
Most of all, lots of stuff is properly placed in unbuffered folders, arranged in archival boxes and nicely put on shelves waiting to be properly labeled, scanned, recorded in a database and possibly loaded on-line. Books are, as a rule, boxed as there are way too many at the present time for me to figure out what is what. I'm just trimming out the chaff and unwanted stuff first. Once I know what is left, then I can get to work on cataloging and arranging titles. Isn't that what retirement is for?
During this hiatus of sorts, I added BooksPrice.com links to the shop. You can see an example here:
and what the BooksPrice.com linkto page looks like:
Cabinet Construction at BooksPrice.com
Select the Compare Price button to get the latest online prices for the title.
In addition, I've updated the Amazon.com widgets for each title to reflect changes the gorilla made in their Associates coding. Personally, I find the whole Associates thing annoying, but the widget is a simply means to link to the title.
More cleanup goings on at the prime site, the shop, the blog, etc. as time goes on. Eventually, all will be spic n span.
Next up in a while or two will be photos and other items through Redbubble. I've always liked the quality of their posters and prints. Unfortunately, Redbubble is located in Australia. Shipping used to take a long time. They now have an affiliate in California so all is well. Prices are very competitive and affordable too. Imagekind does a nice job but is annoying to use, pricier and really not what I had in mind. Cafepress and Zazzle simply don't produce quality prints or posters.
So it's Redbubble. You can see a trial image I created just to see what the product would look like. I ordered a copy and it looks good, really good. Unlike some of the competitors who send the print or poster rolled up, the print arrived in a flat box. We are pleased.
Part of the process of scanning EVERYTHING will be imaging certain photographs and ephemera at higher resolutions for the purpose of adding to redbubble. This will take a while. A long while. A very long while. We're talking photographs. Ephemera. Diderot plates. Book plates and who knows what else. Some stuff will be sent out for imaging simply because of size. I'll figure it out as I go along for the ride.
It's called retirement, remember? There's also some nicely stocked trout ponds and even a few large mouth bass spots too.
Till next, Gary
