Archive for I Robot

GP in Paperback Parade

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , , , , , , , on January 26, 2012 by Aaron

I’ve been sorely remiss in posting about correspondence I’ve had in the past year or so regarding Gnome Press.  Well… ‘sorely remiss’ is a kind of euphemism really.  Putting it succinctly, I’ve just been f***ing lazy.  Time to catch up and pay some dues.

A while back I bought the Armed Forces paperback issue of Pattern for Conquest from Morgan Wallace.  He was kind enough to enlighten me as to his GP interest.  He has all four Gnome paperback issues, and actually wrote a piece for Paperback Parade in 2005 outlining the history of the Gnome Press paperback dalliance.  Morgan sent me scans of his article and of the four GP paperback titles.  Here is first the piece and then his covers.

View this document on Scribd

Many thanks for these Morgan.  They are greatly appreciated and a fantastic addition here at the Odyssey.  They’ll make a permanent home over on the Trivia page.

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I, Robot, fair game on eBay…

Posted in Uncategorized with tags , on September 28, 2010 by Aaron

A few days ago, a copy of Asimov’s I, Robot was available on eBay.  This was interesting because the start price was set very low, though it did have a reserve set.  You can see the completed auction here, at least while it’s still available.  Below are a couple of the images that I swiped from the auction.

As we know, this is the absolute pinnacle of Gnome Press collecting. One of the pinnacles of all of SF collecting for all that. I was extremely interested in the outcome of this. Books are often posted with ‘Buy Now’ prices, but this practice gives no real indication of what a book is really worth. The online dealers don’t help much either as from what I’ve observed over the past couple of years tells me that the typical dealer prices a book something like from 50% to 75% or even more over what a no reserve auction will fetch on eBay. So, as I mentioned, the outcome of this particular auction would be a real eye-opener.  It was.  Reaching a final price of $380, and not reaching reserve meant that it didn’t sell of course. I was surprised.  I expected it to fetch at least $500 or even more.  This particular copy isn’t in great condition, sure, but it isn’t all that bad either considering the status of the title.  Reflecting upon this, I suspect that having a reserve hurt the ultimate value of the auction.

Anyway, thought it was worth chalking this one up for posterity and future reference.

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