u/the-bends — reddlx

What's the smart move?

I am originally from the States but live in the UK now. My wife and I had to return to the States for a wedding last week and I happened to pick up this copy of Tinkers at a 2nd and Charles for $6. I noticed at the shop that it was signed and thought that was a nice little bonus, but now looking at it more closely at home I realized that it's also a first edition, first printing. A little research online and I discover that there were only around 250 of these made and that the book is worth around $1,700 (or at least that's the only price I could find it listed at). Would I be a fool to try and sell it now and turn a profit? Should I expect it to appreciate in price over the coming years and just hold on to it? What's the smart move here?

u/the-bends — 4 days ago

▲ 3 r/TattooArtistsUK

Any referrals for someone in or near London who'd be willing to take on a tattoo like this?

I know this is too insanely detailed to do verbatim, and frankly I'd rather riff on this than get a carbon copy. It's a Yoshitaka Amano piece and I'd really love to find an artist that felt confident that they could reproduce something with a similar feel.

u/the-bends — 2 months ago

▲ 11 r/books

Just as the title says. I do read frequently as is, but I was starting to feel a little guilty about how many books I had on my shelf that I'd had for years and hadn't gotten around to reading. I made a spreadsheet and did the math and figured I'd need to read about 75 pages a day to finish the backlog by the end of this year. Fortunately I've slightly outperformed that so far, even with taking a few days off from reading here and there. So far I've read:

Outlaws of the Marsh

Ship of Theseus

A Greater Monster

The Saga of the Volsungs

The Elder Edda

Beowulf

The Wanderer: Elegies, Epics, and Riddles

The Sagas of Icelanders

I still have 42 more books to read by the end of the year, and around 17.5k pages to get through, but I feel good about what I've accomplished so far. The first block of books represented a fair amount of difficult reading, with most of it being antiquated. Outlaws of the Marsh was entertaining but was still over 2k pages and had a ton of redundancy. I just finished Sagas of the Icelanders today, which was a relief since it was over 700 pages of fairly dry Viking accounts written around the 1200's. Don't get me wrong, there was a lot of entertainment in there as well.

Next I move into some Gene Wolfe novels, which is exciting since he is one of my favorite authors. I do still have some novels looming on the horizon that I'm dreading a bit: namely, Gravity's Rainbow which I've attempted to read a number of times over the years but have never managed, and 1Q84 which is long and I've heard mixed reports on. We'll see how it goes though.

reddit.com

u/the-bends — 2 months ago

▲ 139 r/Watches

I was watching Perry Mason on HBO and loving the watches everyone was wearing. I picked up this late 1920's Elgin that was running but in pretty rough condition. I was able to find an NOS dial for the watch. Just picked it up from being serviced and having the crystal replaced. I'm really thrilled with the results. I do have a better strap heading my way but couldn't wait to show it off. Having been a jazz guitarist for a long time now it feels really cool to have an American made watch from the time that was the height of the music's popularity ticking away on my wrist.

u/the-bends — 2 months ago