Scanners Live in Vain

What the local annual book sale lacked in quantity (for me) it made up for in quality. Among the finds are the 1950 translation of the definitive book about German Shepherds written by the guy who invented the breed, a 1984 edition of the FEI rulebook for Driving(!), and a First Edition-First Printing of Misty of Chincoteague from 1947:

My original Misty of Chincoteague was a 1948 edition that had seen better days, so I was super happy to find an upgrade that was not only in better condition, but was a first-first, too!

Take that, annoying book scanner people!

For those of you unfamiliar with shopping at charity used book sales, there’s a certain class of resellers who use handheld scanners or phone apps to determine if books are worth buying for resale.

They tend to be indiscriminate in their purchases, and focused on more modern books that have scanable barcodes or ISBN numbers. Unless a sale specifically bans them in the first day or hours, they will absolutely overrun the place.

I don’t have an issue with them having an online bookselling business, because I do as well, but a lot of these people are such amateurs.

I showed up an hour late for the sale – aside from the bad traffic, I also had to make a run to the bank, because my Salvation Army shopping spree earlier in the week left me without any fun money at all. Yet I still managed to score some pretty valuable books that were essentially invisible to the scanner people, who were too focused on what their scanners were telling them.

Is there a model horse lesson to be learned from this story?

Of course there is: a tool can’t replace knowledge or experience. A tool is often incapable of distinguishing the subtle nuances that differentiate the valuable from the valueless. This applies to either books, or Breyers.

A Matte Palomino Family Arabian Stallion in ordinary condition? Probably body box material. A mint-in-box Chalky Palomino Family Arabian Stallion with all his paperwork and receipts? That’s a major score!

You want to succeed at collecting? A tool can only take you so far. Work on building the database you carry inside your head.

My other edition of Misty will be going in my BreyerFest book stash (which was absolutely decimated this year) along with a couple of the others. The Fury book is going into my reference library, unless they reissue the Fury mold for BreyerFest next year. (I hope!)

The GSD book will be put online in the near future, because vintage dog reference books have been a really good niche market for me. Just as it was for horse racing, the Metro Detroit area used to be quite a hotbed for dog breeders!

Rin Tin Tin

Did you hear about the new book about Rin Tin Tin? It’s Rin Tin Tin: The Life and the Legend, by Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief. I was doing a little research on the book itself (to wit: was it worth putting on my holiday gift list?) when I ran across this text on the author’s website:

When I was very young, my grandfather kept a Rin Tin Tin figurine sitting on his desk. I wanted desperately to play with it, and even more desperately I wanted to have a German shepherd dog of my own, a dog just like the star of "The Adventures of Rin-Tin-Tin", which debuted on television in 1954. I knew nothing about Rin Tin Tin other than that he was the perfect dog, and that he was a character on television. When by chance I learned that Rin Tin Tin was a real dog, not just a television character—a real dog with a real life that was extraordinary—I was drawn into the story and eventually to the idea of writing this book.

http://susanorlean.com/books/rin-tin-tin.php

So I’m guessing that you’re thinking what I’m thinking - that’s the Breyer figurine she’s talking about! I guess the book is worth my time, though I will have to wait until Christmas or thereabouts before I get my hands on a copy. (No room in the budget for fun stuff until then!)

You’d think it’d be logical for Reeves to re-release the Rin Tin Tin figurine, wouldn’t it? You have a well-reviewed biography by a noted author, who just mentions in passing that a Rin Tin Tin figurine partially inspired her to write the book in the first place?


Nice idea, but I’m not counting on it. For one, he’s a dog, not a horse. While Reeves has not been averse to re-releasing the older dog molds, they’re not big sellers. They’ve seemed particularly averse to re-releasing the Rin Tin Tin mold: we haven’t seen it since 1973, when they discontinued the #327 German Shepherd after a brief two-year-ish run. (Like the Proud Arabian Mare, he was prereleased in late 1971 to/for hobbyists.)

His absence is something of a mystery to me, since the German Shepherd has consistently been one of the most popular dog breeds in the United States, far outpacing both the Collie and the Saint Bernard in terms of registrations.

http://www.akc.org/reg/dogreg_stats.cfm

Yet both the Lassie/Collie and the Saint Bernard molds have seen a couple of re-releases in the not-too-distant past! Hmm. (Also puzzling: Wire Fox Terriers are only 97th on the list? Our little brat certainly doesn't act like it.)

Second: just because I think it’s such an obvious idea doesn’t mean Reeves does. I thought a Pancreatic Cancer benefit horse was a far better - and more appropriate - idea than a Breast Cancer benefit horse (hello, Patrick Swayze!) but the more conventional idea won out.

It could be that Reeves got caught a bit flat-footed about the book; I only found out about it a couple months ago myself. It’s not too late to time a re-release of the mold with the inevitable paperback release of the book sometime next year, though. Could be a nice addition to one of their various "horse and book" series, like the Breyer Horse Collection. (One of the lamest names for a series ever, BTW. Isn’t every series basically a "Breyer horse collection"?)