Read Online The Miskatonic Manuscript (Case Files of Matthew Hunter and Chantal Stevens Book 2) by Vin Suprynowicz - Free Book Online
Authors: Vin Suprynowicz
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it?”
“Just searching ‘handwritten notebook or manuscript from the 1920s’ is too broad, we’d be swamped,” she frowned.
“And he might not even have dated it.”
“Are there keywords?” she asked.
“Yes. That’s your best hope. Any hand-written notebook or manuscript that mentions ‘resonator’ or ‘Annesley.’”
“The Annesleys are a pretty prominent family.”
“Run it and see what happens. If you’re still getting too much, just pare it back to ‘resonator.’”
“OK. I’ll talk to Les; maybe he can think of another keyword.”
“Good. Meantime, there’s something else, Marian.”
“Yes?”
“We’ve got too many books piling up, waiting for me to OK your pricing. If there are books where you’re coming up with too wide a range or you just can’t find any comparables and you’re at a loss, fine, jot a note and leave me the book and we can put our heads together.” This could particularly be a problem with hard-to-find non-fiction, which was three-quarters of the stock. Values for fiction were much better documented. “But you’ve got to screen them all to decide which ones to set aside, anyway. Except for those few where you have questions, why don’t you just go ahead and price anything up to two thousand. Would that be a problem?”
“No, Matthew, not at all.” Marian suppressed a smile. Of course piling books in Matthew’s office that should have been online or on the shelves or both was silly, waiting for a grownup to check her work while Matthew was away for weeks at a time. This would be much more efficient, and it was overdue. It finally put her in complete charge of 98 percent of the stock, leaving Matthew to deal with amanageable number of high-end pieces that usually had to be hand-sold to known collectors, anyway.
“Good,” said Matthew, settling the matter.
With the Internet search turned over to Marian, the initial phone work was left to Matthew. There appeared to be a couple of bookstores in DeLand, Florida — an oddity given the modest size of the town. Still, it was a county seat and there was a college there, you never could tell. The first number Matthew tried was disconnected. The second worked.
“Hi, we’re looking for material related to Robert Hayward Barlow, 1918 to 1951.”
“He was an author?”
“He wrote a brief appreciation of his friend H.P. Lovecraft, called ‘The Wind That Is in the Grass.’”
“Oh, that Barlow. Yes, the University of Tampa published a collection of their letters.”
“Right.”
“That book’s not hard to find.”
“Do you ever see anything else come in that’s related to Barlow or his family? Books or papers that could have belonged to Robert Barlow? He grew up there in DeLand.”
“Gee, if the man died sixty, seventy years ago …”
“I know. We’re just covering our bases. Robert Barlow left home there in DeLand before the war, went to college in California, ended up teaching down in Mexico, he was still pretty young when he died. Sometimes in a case like that some papers and magazines get left in the parents’ house, years later the house gets cleared out, no one knows what to do with boxes of old papers.”
“Don’t I know it. We go to estate sales, we ask ‘Where are the old books and papers?’ People say, ‘Oh, we threw those out, no one would want those.’ Either that, or all they saved are the encyclopedias and the Kennedy assassination newspapers, which they’re convinced should be worth a fortune.”
“Welcome to my world. Are there still Barlows in DeLand?”
“Oh, sure. It’s a fairly common name, here.”
“Well, maybe I could give you our phone number, in case something should turn up. When he was a teen-ager, Barlow was a fan of Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, it’s possible he would have left behind a collection of pulp magazines from the twenties and thirties.”
“The ‘Weird Tales.’”
“Exactly.”
“No, I mean, there was a collection of ‘Weird
“Just searching ‘handwritten notebook or manuscript from the 1920s’ is too broad, we’d be swamped,” she frowned.
“And he might not even have dated it.”
“Are there keywords?” she asked.
“Yes. That’s your best hope. Any hand-written notebook or manuscript that mentions ‘resonator’ or ‘Annesley.’”
“The Annesleys are a pretty prominent family.”
“Run it and see what happens. If you’re still getting too much, just pare it back to ‘resonator.’”
“OK. I’ll talk to Les; maybe he can think of another keyword.”
“Good. Meantime, there’s something else, Marian.”
“Yes?”
“We’ve got too many books piling up, waiting for me to OK your pricing. If there are books where you’re coming up with too wide a range or you just can’t find any comparables and you’re at a loss, fine, jot a note and leave me the book and we can put our heads together.” This could particularly be a problem with hard-to-find non-fiction, which was three-quarters of the stock. Values for fiction were much better documented. “But you’ve got to screen them all to decide which ones to set aside, anyway. Except for those few where you have questions, why don’t you just go ahead and price anything up to two thousand. Would that be a problem?”
“No, Matthew, not at all.” Marian suppressed a smile. Of course piling books in Matthew’s office that should have been online or on the shelves or both was silly, waiting for a grownup to check her work while Matthew was away for weeks at a time. This would be much more efficient, and it was overdue. It finally put her in complete charge of 98 percent of the stock, leaving Matthew to deal with amanageable number of high-end pieces that usually had to be hand-sold to known collectors, anyway.
“Good,” said Matthew, settling the matter.
With the Internet search turned over to Marian, the initial phone work was left to Matthew. There appeared to be a couple of bookstores in DeLand, Florida — an oddity given the modest size of the town. Still, it was a county seat and there was a college there, you never could tell. The first number Matthew tried was disconnected. The second worked.
“Hi, we’re looking for material related to Robert Hayward Barlow, 1918 to 1951.”
“He was an author?”
“He wrote a brief appreciation of his friend H.P. Lovecraft, called ‘The Wind That Is in the Grass.’”
“Oh, that Barlow. Yes, the University of Tampa published a collection of their letters.”
“Right.”
“That book’s not hard to find.”
“Do you ever see anything else come in that’s related to Barlow or his family? Books or papers that could have belonged to Robert Barlow? He grew up there in DeLand.”
“Gee, if the man died sixty, seventy years ago …”
“I know. We’re just covering our bases. Robert Barlow left home there in DeLand before the war, went to college in California, ended up teaching down in Mexico, he was still pretty young when he died. Sometimes in a case like that some papers and magazines get left in the parents’ house, years later the house gets cleared out, no one knows what to do with boxes of old papers.”
“Don’t I know it. We go to estate sales, we ask ‘Where are the old books and papers?’ People say, ‘Oh, we threw those out, no one would want those.’ Either that, or all they saved are the encyclopedias and the Kennedy assassination newspapers, which they’re convinced should be worth a fortune.”
“Welcome to my world. Are there still Barlows in DeLand?”
“Oh, sure. It’s a fairly common name, here.”
“Well, maybe I could give you our phone number, in case something should turn up. When he was a teen-ager, Barlow was a fan of Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard, it’s possible he would have left behind a collection of pulp magazines from the twenties and thirties.”
“The ‘Weird Tales.’”
“Exactly.”
“No, I mean, there was a collection of ‘Weird
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