Sag’ mir, wo die Blumen sind? I can scarcely credit that over a quarter of a century has passed since I wrote, illustrated, photocopied, folded, collated, stapled, signed and numbered fifty copies of The Churn In The Muck. Now, this spineless out of print pamphlet will set you back £93. That’s how much a copy is selling for on eBay.
What do you get for your cash? “Vintage Frank Key surrealist writing, in a booklet that contains 4 pages of wallpaper sample and 4 pages of tracing paper. There is a murderous rivalry over an Icelandic fontoon buried at the bottom of a lake. Indefatigable Hungarian detective Bulent Hellbag arrives on the scene to solve the case”, according to Serendipity Bookstore in the far Antipodes. I should point out that, in addition to the wallpaper and tracing paper, there are actually pages of text, too. (I am not sure the blurb makes that quite clear.)
Let’s hope some out-of-print Dobson pamphlets will surface similarly at Serendipity Bookstore in the far Antipodes.
It sold for an unidentifiable Best Offer.
I’ll hang on to my copy. Forever.
Incidentally if you search for Frank Key in Books on eBay you get “The Very Best of Frank Sinatra: Original Keys for Singers; Vocal, Piano , PB , F”.
Not quite as good.
Ah, Guy … pleased to see you are still here after all these decades.
It was I who purchased this copy, and it arrived onboard my ship of fools today. It is number 21. I was looking at it with a friend and pointed out the copywrite was a tyed “C” later circled by pen. My friend then pointed out the ISBN number, but I was unable to look it up later. Is there a story behind that?
Alex : The story, such as it is, is that the pamphlet was bashed out on an old electronic typewriter which did not have a copyright sign, as these newfangled “word processors” do. So a C and a cackhanded circle was the best I could do. I acquired a set of ISBN numbers for the Malice Aforethought Press so the one shown is valid, legal, and ticketyboo.