[based on the ver­sion of 18 July 2004 from the old blog site]

An idea came to me some days back. For the most part, it was inspired by my deep and carefully-​​considered abhor­rence of eBay’s recent “mar­ket­ing moves”, but it’s also (I think) a neat new idea.

I want to share it. I’ve seri­ously con­sid­ered patent­ing it. Instead, I’m just going to throw it out there into the realm of pub­lic dis­course — and prior art. If you think it’s a good idea, please do take a minute to read the Cre­ative Com­mons license word­ing down there in the bot­tom right of the page — it’s important.

Back­ground

It’s dif­fi­cult even in the best cir­cum­stances for col­lectibles and one-​​of-​​a-​​kind items to sell at a fair price. I’m talk­ing about things that aren’t com­modi­ties. Things for which there is lit­tle or no com­pe­ti­tion. To sum­ma­rize a whole lot of advanced mar­ket­ing research and com­pli­cated eco­nom­ics in one par­tial sen­tence: the prob­lem lies in the spar­sity of poten­tial cus­tomers, the diver­sity of rea­sons they might want the thing, and the dif­fi­culty of let­ting the right peo­ple know it’s for sale. And some other places, too.

In real-​​life mar­kets, whether they’re Yan­kee auc­tions or dou­ble auc­tions (stock) or fixed-​​price store­fronts, non-​​commodity items are (I’ll declare with­out schol­arly jus­ti­fi­ca­tion) a typ­i­cally under­priced. Read about the Rev­enue Equiv­a­lence The­o­rem if you want to under­stand it the way clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics approaches this, but real­ize that this impor­tant result depends upon assump­tions like mul­ti­ple peo­ple inter­ested in each item are present at the sale and every poten­tial bid­der is there for the full dura­tion of the sale. Go buy and sell things like roadmaps and estate jew­elry and antique horse­shoes — or just attend two real-​​life estate auc­tions — if you want to really under­stand how the “crowd” affects the sale price of items.

Here’s the kicker: Online, it can be worse.

All that hype they (we) were toss­ing around dur­ing the dot­com rev­o­lu­tion was simul­ta­ne­ously true and false. There are more peo­ple using the Inter­net to look at auc­tion sales than there are attend­ing any one seller’s phys­i­cal shopfront or real-​​world auc­tion: the extra peo­ple are out there. So based on that alone, the odds seem to be higher that some­body who’s inter­ested in your exact item might find it. But in the same period, it has become so incred­i­bly easy to cre­ate an online sale that there are more things for sale, mak­ing it far, far harder for these more numer­ous cus­tomers to find your par­tic­u­lar stuff. Tragedy, meet Com­mons. Com­mons, Tragedy.

If there aren’t enough peo­ple see­ing the offer­ing, then there surely is less chance of an up-​​bid in an auc­tion for­mat sale. Keep in mind that both auc­tion and fixed-​​price sales typ­i­cally need to be seen by mul­ti­ple inter­ested par­ties before the price approaches a fair value: Auc­tion pric­ing depends on up-​​bids to dis­cover prices, and sell­ers using fixed price sales need to be able to adjust prices upwards between sales to dis­cover fair price. In either case, the time-​​scale needed to wait until they hap­pen by with their money in their hot lit­tle hands is longer than the time the price might nor­mally change.

In brief: unfind­able offer­ings com­mand decreased prices.

It’s inter­est­ing to con­sider that eBay’s and Yahoo’s Yankee-​​style auc­tions typ­i­cally last for seven to ten days. Orig­i­nally, when these venues were new and there were far fewer items on offer than there are today, that was enough time for mul­ti­ple inter­ested bid­ders to see the sale and decide whether to bid or not. Now that there is an over­whelm­ing assort­ment of offer­ings, and find­abil­ity is gone, the 7-​​day auc­tion is arguably no bet­ter than a 1-​​day auc­tion, and just a cash cow for eBay (who charge by the list­ing).
Brows­ing eBay cat­e­gories in which there are a mix of com­modi­ties and col­lectibles, such as Books, you’ll see a strange dichotomy: There are hun­dreds of copies of a com­mod­ity best­seller like Cold Moun­tain on offer, and inso­far as there are suf­fi­cient buy­ers to gen­er­ate demand, the mar­ket is liq­uid and fair pric­ing is active — you can see mul­ti­ple bids on many of the books, and the final prices are very sim­i­lar for sim­i­lar quality.

But look at the anti­quar­ian books, the “col­lectible” books, each much scarcer than a com­mod­ity book. Even though the col­lectibles dom­i­nate eBay’s list­ings in aggre­gate, you will see that very few sell, and those that do typ­i­cally sell with one bid.

There’s no up-​​bidding for col­lectibles, even though online sales are sup­pos­edly made for these items. I can think of at least two ways to inter­pret this. One is that the seller has set the start­ing bid too high for the mar­ket to sup­port — but the $3.99 I pay on eBay these days for a truly rare old book doesn’t strike me as over­priced, even if it’s in rough con­di­tion. The other, more rea­son­able inter­pre­ta­tion is that there are too many sales com­pet­ing for the lim­ited atten­tion of the bid­ders. They sim­ply don’t encounter the sales in which they would be interested.

Illiq­uid­ity.

And as eBay and the other major con­sol­i­dated venues con­tinue to dom­i­nate, I can’t see how the sit­u­a­tion can improve for sell­ers, and as a con­se­quence for the cen­tral­ized venues. Com­modi­ties will sell at fair prices with mul­ti­ple bid­ders, sim­ply because even the most inex­pert cus­tomer can’t swing a cat with­out hit­ting one. Search works. But the spe­cial­ized items like antiques and col­lectibles are lost against the back­ground of the com­modi­ties, and lost among one another.

Peo­ple don’t have time to find things.
What is a Ratchet Auction?

Some days ago I wrote about Dutch (descend­ing) auc­tions, and pro­posed the notion of the Drunkard’s Auc­tion, in which the price makes a ran­dom walk up or down each tick, where the ear­li­est, high­est offer match­ing the cur­rent price is the clos­ing price.

I like the Drunkard’s Auc­tion for­mat because unlike the more com­mon Yan­kee (increas­ing) auc­tion or even the tra­di­tional Dutch auc­tion, it never ends until some­body makes an offer. If nobody has come along, it may wan­der on in its ran­dom walk, vis­it­ing all pos­si­ble prices even­tu­ally. Even when some­body makes an offer at a fixed price, it may still take some time before the walk matches that price. That’s a good thing, I’ll argue, when you’re offer­ing an item a shal­low mar­ket like collectibles.

That said, it has some flaws. It’s ran­dom. If you sam­ple the price at ran­dom, it tends to sit in the mid­dle of the spec­i­fied range.

In response, I’ve con­cocted this:

Sup­pose the seller has an item they want to offer in an online sale, but because it is unusual (an antique or col­lectible) they have (a) a poor idea of a fair fixed price that will not tie it up in their inven­tory, and (b) no expec­ta­tion that suf­fi­cient audi­ence will be present dur­ing the course of a limited-​​time increas­ing auc­tion to drive the price up to a fair one.

The seller ini­tially sets sev­eral para­me­ters defin­ing the sale’s price dynamics:

• The max­i­mum price is the start­ing price at which the lot will be offered.
• The min­i­mum price is the low­est price the seller is will­ing to accept for the lot.
• The dis­count incre­ment is the amount the price will typ­i­cally drop between two steps of the sale.
• The price per­sis­tence is the length of time a price is in effect before it changes again automatically.
• The ratchet prob­a­bil­ity is the chance that the price will jump up rather than drop­ping down by the dis­count increment
• The resid­ual dis­count deter­mines the amount of dis­count remain­ing when the price ratch­ets up.

(Does this sound like a lot to jug­gle? As it turns out, I sus­pect that many may be set to default val­ues, leav­ing only the max­i­mum price, min­i­mum price and price per­sis­tence as things that might be set by the less con­trol­ling seller.)

The lot is offered for sale at the max­i­mum price ini­tially. Peri­od­i­cally there­after, at fixed times deter­mined by the price per­sis­tence, there is a ran­dom change in the price. For a ratchet prob­a­bil­ity p, there is a prob­a­bil­ity (1–p) that the dis­count will increase (that is, the price will decrease) by the fixed amount of the dis­count incre­ment, and a prob­a­bil­ity p that all but the resid­ual dis­count will dis­ap­pear.

Finally, if the price is so low that the next dis­count would drop it below the min­i­mum price, then it will instead revert to the max­i­mum price (wrap around).

Poten­tial cus­tomers have two options: They may buy the item at the cur­rent asked price. Or they can make an offer, a pub­lic promise to buy the item when the price crosses a spec­i­fied price level.

Let’s play with an exam­ple. Sup­pose the max­i­mum price is $100, the min­i­mum price is $10, the dis­count incre­ment is $1, the price per­sis­tence is 1 hour, the ratchet prob­a­bil­ity is 3% and the resid­ual dis­count is ¹⁄₆. The online sale starts at a price of $100, and every hour there­after there’s a 97% chance that it will drop by another dol­lar and a 3% chance that it will jump back up ⁵⁄₆ of the way to $100. Say at one point it’s at $64: at the end of the hour, it will either drop to $63 or jump up to $94. If some­body comes along and buys the item out­right before the end of the hour, they pay $64; if they make an offer at $63 or $63.99, then they have a 97% chance of win­ning (assum­ing there are no other offers that pre­cede theirs, or are for higher bids). If the price should hap­pen to ratchet up, then their offer to buy at that price stands until they change or can­cel it. And if nobody comes along, and the price drops to say $10.12, then the next time the price changes it will either jump all the way back to $100 (97% chance) or it will ratchet back up to some­where less than that (3% chance).

Now, I’ll just state with­out detailed sup­port­ing argu­ment that a suc­cess­ful web-​​based sale using a Ratchet Auc­tion will depend not merely on the tra­di­tional infor­ma­tion sup­plied by auc­tion sites — pic­tures, descrip­tion, con­di­tion, cur­rent price and the like — but also will require that the exact prob­a­bil­i­ties of prices in the near future, and bid­der inter­est in the item are disclosed.

So let’s imag­ine that for each auc­tion item there is a lit­tle time-​​series graph show­ing the price over the recent past. This graph is anno­tated very clearly to indi­cate the exact time that the price will next change, and what the val­ues will be. It is anno­tated to show the web page views for the auc­tion as lit­tle tick-​​marks along the time axis. It is also anno­tated with a hor­i­zon­tal line show­ing every open offer, start­ing at the time it was logged, and at the price offered. Like this:

A graph rather like this one is shown to any­body view­ing the sale web page. It shows the price, the page views, and the offers. It shows the community’s inter­est in the item, and the tim­ing and prices of the offers are sig­nals to the seller about the gen­eral mar­ket for the offering.

The price time-​​series is that lit­tle stair-​​stepping line, which steps down (likely) or ratch­ets back up (rarely) every tick of the clock — for­ever, if nobody ever buys the damned thing. Every time any­body views the page, an indi­ca­tor is added to the graph (those rather inad­e­quate lit­tle blue ticks along the bot­tom of the graph are sup­posed to rep­re­sent that). So peo­ple know how many oth­ers are watch­ing. If any­body wants to buy the item at the cur­rent price, they can — in our exam­ple, nobody has done so. Instead, a num­ber of peo­ple have made offers, indi­cated by those broad hor­i­zon­tal lines. As soon as any user enters an offer, every­body gets to see it. When­ever any offer is crossed by the price, that per­son wins (the green offer line is the win­ner, in this case).

I’ve tried to indi­cate a lit­tle of what I think might hap­pen in this car­toon: First, that offers can be can­celed or changed by the bid­ders. Sec­ond, that low­ball offers (like that long line low on the left) will take for­ever to close. Third, that bid­ding wars and up-​​bidding can occur here just as in a Yan­kee auc­tion (wit­ness the lit­tle lad­der of offers in the mid­dle). Fourth, that the past doesn’t mat­ter — an offer that is expired or changed is no longer bind­ing, as is the case with the per­son who made an offer of about $65 between steps 50–80; even though the price sub­se­quently drops below that offer, it’s been can­celed or moved, and so they don’t win.

That’s it. The sale will con­tinue adjust­ing the price with no inter­ven­tion from the seller. Some small amount of web-​​based infra­struc­ture would be needed to update the graphs and keep track of and report the offers. At some point — when­ever prospec­tive cus­tomers hap­pen to come by — they will buy the item out­right or make an offer. As noted above, low­ball bids will take a long time for the price to reach that level, and there’s a sig­nif­i­cant risk that some more rea­son­able per­son will come along and buy the item at a higher price.

There’s a lot of tun­ing that one can do, too. You might imag­ine, given the num­bers I’ve used here ($100 max, $10 min, $1 incre­ment, ¹⁄₆ resid­ual, 3% ratchet prob­a­bil­ity) that the price will spend a long time way down low. Nope:

This is a his­togram of prices seen in 10000 steps of the same time-​​series used in the pre­vi­ous fig­ure. The red line indi­cates the mean price over time — some­where up around $72. Coun­ter­in­tu­itive, after look­ing at the prices in the first fig­ure? Here’s a hypoth­e­sis for some nice empir­i­cal econ­o­mist to test in the future: I think that these simple-​​seeming down­ward trends over­whelm­ingly trig­ger our instincts about momen­tum, trick­ing us into think­ing the price is headed for $0 every time it con­tin­ues on down for a while.

Here are a few more steps (500) — trace along and make a pre­dic­tion, based on this sam­ple, of the aver­age price. I betcha you’re waaaaayyyy under­es­ti­mat­ing it. I know I do. If you were pre­sented with this graph, and you actu­ally wanted to bid on the item, what would you bid? How ratio­nal are you feelin’, punk?

No, wait — it gets bet­ter with more trans­parency. The auc­tion list­ing should not only fully dis­close the his­tor­i­cal prices, the page views, and the tim­ing and prices of offers, but should also explic­itly state the prob­a­bil­i­ties and the pos­si­ble prices in the next tick. As in “there is a 3% chance the price will be $50, and a 97% chance that it will be 22.” And also explic­itly list every per­son who has made an offer, what its price level is, and and how dif­fer­ent offers are in effect. What we want, hon­estly, is to pres­sure the vis­i­tor into buy­ing now or mak­ing a higher offer than any­body else’s. And trans­parency is the key to that.

Unlike a Yan­kee (eBay-​​style) auc­tion sale, low­ball offers are post­poned, not imme­di­ate. In a ratchet auc­tion, it seems that the incen­tive to bid is spread out more evenly in time, whereas a Yan­kee auc­tion increases pres­sure to bid towards the sched­uled end­point. By spread­ing out the pres­sure to bid, I’ll argue that a ratchet auc­tion caters to asyn­chro­nous vis­its by poten­tial cus­tomers, could as a result lead to improved sales prices in sit­u­a­tions where you do not have the full and syn­chro­nized atten­tion of the marketplace.

Like an online site, say.

Ron Jef­fries notes that what I’ve described now could be man­aged by hand by a seller, if the period was suf­fi­ciently long. You could, I sup­pose, just change the prices in your store­front and update the accom­pa­ny­ing graphs, and accept offers via email. There is a small mat­ter of get­ting the cus­tomers to trust that you’re not ratch­et­ing the price up in response to their offers — but you know, there always is, isn’t there? And there’s still a prob­lem in get­ting peo­ple to see your offer­ings in the first place.

Sounds like there are some things left unre­solved. I have some ideas, but I’m tired. I’ll get to them in a bit.

In the mean­time, con­sider how it is you came across this lit­tle entry of mine. There are so many other things for you to read. How is it that you’re here, now?

If a book should become infested with mildews and stench, the acolyte must ven­ture forth to pro­cure a cas­ket, one not over-​​large but also never used, with a tight and sturdy lid. Before leav­ing the depart­ment of Rub­ber­maid, cir­cle the aisle thrice wid­der­shins and say unto the Sec­ond Clerk when it is met: I adjure you, Abonometh, Azri­pan, Abonometh, Sec­ond Clerk — where is the cat lit­ter? If the Sec­ond Clerk doth obfus­cate, pro­duce the Stave and make the Sign of Defen­es­tra­tion, and speak: Greebo! Greebo! Greebo! I am not dis­suaded! Arm & Ham­mer Brand will be fine! Is it in the Gro­ceries sec­tion? and then the clerk will direct you thence. Many fall or fal­ter upon the long path from Stor­age Solu­tions to Gro­ceries, for tempt­ing del­i­ca­cies may be offered unto the unwary; fal­ter not, but rather fast, and par­take of nei­ther sausage nor crab­cake nor cof­fee. If chal­lenged, make the Sign of Defen­es­tra­tion twice and turn aside, always along the heart­line; the path may waver, but goal should never change. The acolyte must depart with the cas­ket of rub­ber with a tight lid, and the cat lit­ter; on occa­sion, sil­ica gel may also be obtained. Thence depart this place with all haste.

Pre­pare a Short Rack of Metal or Wood, such as would fit inside the cas­ket and be about the height of a fin­ger from the bot­tom. Con­sult the Moon as required. A cookie sheet will do in a pinch.

Place the cas­ket of plas­tic in the rit­ual cir­cle, for it should not be dis­turbed over­much by chil­dren or house­hold famil­iars. Cleanse the book which doth stink care­fully with Swif­fers and dry paper tow­els, using always the utmost care and patience, while chant­ing qui­etly: Stink away. Stink away. Fly stinky away. Abronalith. Stink away. Spread the cat lit­ter as deep as two knuck­le­bones in the bot­tom of the cas­ket, pour­ing in a sin­gle motion, say­ing: Lord Zygax, pro­tect this book from the stench, Oh Lord I hope this works. Avaunt!

Avoid breath­ing the dust.

Place the Short Rack of Metal or Wood upon the cat lit­ter. Do not allow the Short Rack of Metal or Wood to be cov­ered entirely. Next place upon the Short Rack of Metal or Wood the books which stink, say­ing, UVAVU. ERANU If the cas­ket and books and the Short Rack of Metal or Wood should allow, fan the pages of the books so that they are open to the still air within the cas­ket; this will draw out the waters of evil. Next seal the cas­ket. Tie above it a frog dipped in honey. When ants and flies have cleaned the bones of the frog entirely, the books shall be relieved of its stink, and may be used with pleasure.

Lack­ing a frog, check in about a week.

This process may be amended to pre­vent the dropsy, in the nor­mal manner.

We’ve just returned from an expe­di­tion of about 1500 miles, with about 1500 books.

When I said I’d go get them, I knew very lit­tle about them. When I saw them, I was embar­rassed and sad. Now that I’ve han­dled each and every one of them… well, I’m hap­pier than a clam. And clams, I am told, are quite happy indeed.

A few weeks ago, in my nor­mal daily eBay shop­ping I hap­pened across some very inter­est­ing anti­quar­ian books on eBay. These were not just “vin­tage” or “nice old” books, but real and valu­able anti­quar­ian trea­sures. When I checked the seller’s other auc­tions, I saw a lot many of those were just as inter­est­ing. I placed a few bids.

I won them.

For a few dol­lars or even cents each.

She kept list­ing new stuff.

Some­where in one of our cor­re­spon­dences regard­ing pay­ment and ship­ping I non­cha­lantly asked — because my wife Bar­bara has been enjoy­ing par­tic­i­pat­ing in Project Guten­berg so much, and because the few dozen books I had received were in worn but still fas­ci­nat­ing (and still very, very valu­able) shape — whether the seller had any more like that. Who knows: maybe some that were more beat up than she was will­ing to get rid of cheap, or maybe some that were miss­ing cov­ers but com­plete (for Project Gutenberg)?

Or maybe — just in case, you know — more nice old unusual stuff like I had already bought from her?

Her answer was very close to, “Sure! How many you want? I bought a barn-​​full, and I want to get rid of them all real quick!”

Now it should be obvi­ous to any­body who knows me — whether just from read­ing here, or from rep­u­ta­tion, but surely any­body who has vis­ited our house — that I am a bull when it comes to rare books, and that a state­ment like this is a big flap­ping red flag. Here I sat, read­ing that email, and my head turned up and I squinted cal­cu­lat­ingly across the room at the stack of rar­i­ties she had sent me already, and I closely exam­ined her other eBay auc­tions… you could hear lit­tle machine noises and churn­ing and light­bulbs flash­ing and pop­ping, and all sorts of metaphoric schem­ing noises (let alone the lit­eral gur­gling) ema­nat­ing from me.

Barn. Full. Books.

I mean, what else could I do? “How many is a ‘barn-​​full’?” I replied, with forced non­cha­lance. Her answer was rather ambigu­ous but encour­ag­ing. A lot. More than a thousand.

Lots of old books.

For the next few days, the passer-​​by might hear sounds of carefully-​​timed rev­e­la­tion, plead­ing, cajol­ing, and the like com­ing from our house­hold. Detailed maps of Vir­ginia and West Vir­ginia were bought. Cars were rented. Plans were made and changed and cal­en­dars pushed out and….

Well, we’re back. The books we have brought home are lovely, exceed­ing both my ini­tial expec­ta­tions, and def­i­nitely beat­ing the first impres­sion they gave. Some, yes, some are now gone on to bet­ter lives as nascent soil… but many sur­vived, or have been res­ur­rected, and so will grace book­shelves here and else­where as their authors intended.

This is the story of a road trip. We went unin­formed and on a lark. We arrived at our des­ti­na­tion with trep­i­da­tion, after adven­tures involv­ing the Civil War, mum­mies and thou­sands of daylilies. What we found seemed dis­ap­point­ing on the face of it. But by the time the dust had set­tled, and we saw what we had in our hands, the delight came back. With interest.

8:48am 20 June 2004 [odome­ter reads 33 miles] Bar­bara and I set out in a rented Dodge mini­van from her par­ents’ house in Plain City, Ohio. It is a mini­van, and not our own pickup truck, and the seats of the mini­van have been left at the rental place for more room because the seller (call her JH) said, “Oh, yeah, they should all fit in a pickup truck. We brought them home that way from the sale where we bought them.” But at the same time, she tells me there are about 1700 books.

Now because we’re mov­ing, Bar­bara and I have been pack­ing books for months now — ours, my Mom’s, my Mom’s friends’ — and I can tell you than our truck holds exactly 14 book boxes under the ton­neau cover, and also that each box holds no more than about 40 books, unless they’re dinky lit­tle paper­backs. Some­thing doesn’t gibe in the “one truck-​​full” and “1700 of them” num­bers. There’s a clear volume/​density incon­gruity happening.

Well, sure, we could leave the ton­neau cover off, and stack them up like the Bev­erly Hill­bil­lies. But, but… if it should rain in the 500 miles we need to drive them back, they’ll get wet! Wet! (Iron­i­cally, on this first morn­ing, in my igno­rance of the events to fol­low, I still believed that a lit­tle water would ruin the nice pris­tine old books we were going to res­cue. Heh. In hind­sight, it would have improved some.) At all costs one must pro­tect the books, old books in particular.

Erring on the side of the “1700” and not the “one truck-​​load”, we are dri­ving a seat­less rented mini­van, with 33 miles on its odometer.

9:40am 20 June 2004 [69 miles] We’ve cleared Colum­bus, and it’s a beau­ti­ful crys­talline high-​​pressure Mid­west­ern sum­mer day. Spir­its run high. The land is lush and green, and the hints of the Appalachi­ans are start­ing to show.

Well, not entirely lush and green: what exactly is wrong with the locust trees near the Ohio River? They’re plen­ti­ful, and seem to have some new growth, but on every one the older leaves seem sere and brown. Do cicadas do some­thing to them? Is there some new bug we need to worry about? I really need to know, since we’re con­sid­er­ing plant­ing one in the front yard to replace the frickin’ pin oak that’s dying of some other unpro­nounce­able fun­gal infection.

11:29am 20 June 2004 [179 miles] West Vir­ginia. State lines are an arbi­trary and purely social con­struct but nonethe­less a wor­thy mile­stone. We’ve crossed the Ohio river, and are one step closer to our goal.

Along the way, we have been dis­cussing plans of attack. We have this day of beau­ti­ful sun­shine, and the next day of poten­tial clouds and rain. Bar­bara sug­gests that we take the slower, more touristy route to Staunton, VA by way of US 50 and US 250, via Park­ers­burg and Phillippi, WV and Mon­terey, VA. I recall a note I saw on the Road Geeks web­site ask­ing for pic­tures of the old sig­nage at the orig­i­nal end of US 250 in Grafton, just along the route Bar­bara has men­tioned, so we head off for Grafton as a stopping-​​off point.

11:43am 20 June 2004 [190 miles] Lunch at the Park­ers­burg, WV McDon­alds. Why is it, Bar­bara will ask some hours later, that the builders of West Virginia’s roads can­not man­age to place food and ser­vices any closer than 3 or 4 miles away from the main road? Is it to main­tain a sem­blance of unspoiled coun­try life?

1:35pm 20 June 2004 [279 miles] Grafton, WV. An inter­est­ing lit­tle town, filled with lovely brick and gothic stone archi­tec­ture, all in rel­a­tive dis­re­pair. Their post office is impres­sive, set along­side the rail­road and tow­er­ing sev­eral sto­ries into the air. Their banks and cour­t­house and other build­ings and ruined man­sions are also impres­sive, flat­tered by the bril­liant sun­light. Many pic­tures are taken (from the car, to save time). The Bal­ti­more & Ohio rail­road ter­mi­nal is espe­cially nice.

Wish we had more time to visit this area. It seems quiet and nice. But we can’t find any note­wor­thy sig­nage to pho­to­graph. I’d feel bet­ter about sub­mit­ting arbi­trary snap­shots if we could deter­mine the actual his­tor­i­cal end of the road.

1:50pm 20 June 2004 [284 miles] Web­ster, WV — “Home of Mother’s Day” Charm­ing lit­tle moun­tain town.

Hang on — what’s this? We find a place to do a U-​​turn (not a sim­ple mat­ter on a West Vir­ginia coun­try road), and head back a half-​​mile to see Hays’ Daylily Farm. Heme­ro­cal­lis is a favorite around our house­hold, and after all this is our vaca­tion­ish day, and after all we’re here and we’ve never seen a daylily farm, so… Down a long and wind­ing single-​​lane gravel road, up a rolling hill­side, and thence to a lovely broad expanse of sun­lit beds. Thou­sands of bloom­ing (early early, this time of year) daylilies. Are they open? There’s no “Open” sign? Me, I fret about these things, don’t want to bother folks on Sun­day. Is it a house? A busi­ness? Are they open? Are we being rude?

One shouldn’t worry about these things too much, I real­ize in hind­sight. The Hays fam­ily are home, and it is their home, and they’re great folks and own and sell some amaz­ingly pretty flow­ers. As is often the case with hobby-​​related busi­nesses, they orig­i­nally started sell­ing their lilies so they could make more room for the new ones, and now they have a cat­a­log of sev­eral hun­dreds. Lise and her son were out work­ing on the label­ing, and we chat for some time (here they are with Bar­bara) about the var­i­ous mer­its and dan­gers of water­proof mark­ers, metal tags, plas­tic ties, and sun-​​bleaching.

The ironic jux­ta­po­si­tion of daylilies and books should be pointed out, as it was that after­noon. Hob­bies gone wild. Here we all are, sur­rounded by the extras of our hob­bies gone wild. Though their hobby brings them in con­tact with won­drous, appeal­ing stuff like frogs and dec­o­rated drag­on­flies; mine with icky sil­ver­fish and mildew.

Not only are there daylilies that the Hay­ses have col­lected for them­selves through the years, but spe­cial Hays-​​bred Heme­ro­cal­lis, and Asian lilies in respectably vivid hues, and also Japan­ese irises. Beau­ti­ful plants I’ve never had an eye for, but here pre­sent­ing an strik­ingly robust yet frilly habit. Another thing to accu­mu­late, someday.

After the books.

But the daylilies. I try to sit­u­ate myself to take an over­all pic­ture of their beds, but there are a dozen beds at least, all con­tain­ing sev­eral hun­dred plants. Not a chance — the hori­zon is too close to get them all. Instead, we chat, run around oohing and admir­ing, not­ing that there was no rust appar­ent, and lis­ten­ing to what I can only assume was a mock­ing­bird loudly imper­son­at­ing in turns a blue­jay, a car­di­nal, the dis­tinc­tive and well-​​known “screeeeeee” of the red-​​tailed hawk, and a crow. (Unless that was a really crowded oak tree.)

We promise to return. And we will. My Mom will want to see them. I want to see them. If you live in a place where it can be arranged, you really ought to go see a thou­sand or so dif­fer­ent daylily hybrids, all in bloom at once. Try July in Michi­gan, and ear­lier far­ther south in the US.

And if you’re in the area, try the Hays’ Daylily Farm, in about two weeks.

4:00pm 20 June 2004 [300 miles] All the way to Philippi, I have a loose mem­ory rat­tling around in my skull. What is it about Philippi? We have no guide­books since we didn’t expect to be here at all, so it can’t be some­thing I read recently… ahh, well, we’ll just have to look —

What’s this. A cov­ered bridge? An inter­est­ing bridge. An old bridge, clearly. Ohh, blast, now this is really start­ing to feel famil­iar from some­thing I’ve seen, yet I’ve never been here… what is it about Philippi?!

Aha! From the gas sta­tion across the bridge, look­ing back towards the north­ern part of town, an image of the old train depot sparks the mem­ory! From a TV show watched late at night, Dis­cov­ery or National Geo­graphic or Fox…. Mum­mies! The Philippi Mum­mies! I nab Bar­bara as she comes out of the gas sta­tion, and we drive back into the lit­tle depot museum. Surely, they will know some­thing about the mummies!

Unan­tic­i­pated forteana: always a plus.

When we walk into the museum, we meet Olivia Sue Lam­bert, the vol­un­teer cura­tor. First thing she does is tell us the his­tor­i­cal museum is free of charge, and we should enjoy our visit. Sec­ond thing she does is look me in the eye, then looks us up and down, then says with a grin, “And if you’d like to see the mum­mies, there’s a dollar-​​a-​​person charge.”

Hur­rah! She not only knows about the mum­mies, she has them read­ily at hand.

Ms. Lam­bert is a lovely lady, full of humor and anec­dote and a delighted enthu­si­asm regard­ing the things and stuff that have been entrusted and accu­mu­lated here in the Bar­bour County His­tor­i­cal Museum. Not least the mil­i­taria (we hear about the Philippi Races, the first land bat­tle of the Civil War, and how it came to be called by that unusual name), the bridge (we learn how its inven­tor won the con­tract for build­ing it by stand­ing on his scale model, embar­rass­ing the other com­peti­tors who could not; we learn how it was the site of the bat­tle; we learn how not long ago it blew up and burned, yet was sim­ply scraped clean and set back in place), the cat­e­gory 1 hur­ri­cane of 1985 that sub­merged the town and the build­ing (and the mem­o­ra­bilia and the mum­mies) for sev­eral days, the odds and ends that folks find in the dirt and their attics and bring in ‘acause they’re old, which are then iden­ti­fied in many cases by the vis­i­tors). And she shows us a mirac­u­lous lawn­mower. I sup­pose said lawn­mower might be con­sid­ered the least of the mar­vels by those enam­ored of bat­tles and famous names and the like, but I assure you it was a fas­ci­nat­ing thing I can’t begin to describe here, for it func­tions in a man­ner utterly unlike any extant lawn­mower one may see today.

I am embar­rassed to say, how­ever, that all dur­ing this extrav­a­ganza I tend to check my watch. In hind­sight I wish I hadn’t rushed things — I wish we’d just given up the day at this point and set­tled there in Philippi for the night and spent another hour or two in the museum and the local envi­rons. But alas I ask, if politely and in a round­about way, about the mys­te­ri­ous closed door for which we had paid our two greenbacks.

And so we get to see the mum­mies. We learn a great deal about them. They are the bod­ies of the insane. The means of their nigh-​​miraculous preser­va­tion is not only known, it’s patented. No mer­cury or arsenic was used in their preser­va­tion, but rather a safe, cheap and in fact potable embalm­ing mix­ture was used to pre­serve them — and do please recall that they were under water for four days straight when Hur­ri­cane Juan hit. These sad mad dead folk are really and truly preserved.

Much more infor­ma­tion passes amongst us (in both direc­tions, since of course we add our own obser­va­tions and insights to the mix), but I fear I do not have the time to spell it all out here. We dis­cuss the won­ders of Civil War period How­itzer shells, and par­tial weapons lost by famous and some­times fool­ish gen­er­als, the let­ters of semi-​​famous peo­ple, the plea­sures of well-​​preserved fur­ni­ture, the odd rocks that are brought to the museum by kids and turn out to be of great inter­est, and drums that were at the bat­tle of Appomatox.

I heartily rec­om­mend the Bar­bour County His­tor­i­cal Museum as a des­ti­na­tion — along with the Hays’s place — and frankly pine for a day or two to spend the area. We missed the ren­o­vated man­sion, the his­toric down­town area of Philippi, and numer­ous other sights of inter­est in the sur­round­ing area. And every­body should have a chance to chat with Olivia Sue Lam­bert. Really.

But, but, but. Prac­ti­cal­ity intrudes in our vaca­tion­let. What with the daylilies and museum, we note that the sun is low­er­ing. Ms. Lam­bert asks us where we’re head­ing, and when she hears it’s Staunton she makes a wor­ried sound and a frowny face and advises us that the moun­tain switch­backs can be tricky at this time of the day. Sound advice from a local (always take it, except when it comes to the best ice cream in town), so we ask after an alter­na­tive route. Since this is the vaca­tion­ish day any­way, we head down towards Lewis­burg, WV instead of Staunton on her advice. Much eas­ier and more straight­for­ward, we are told, and we all three wave good­bye and part for now.

approx 8:00pm 20 June 2004 [429 miles] In hind­sight, I can’t imag­ine what US 250 between Phillippi and Staunton must be like. It must be very, very bad. Like moun­tain roads in dis­puted areas of Kash­mir, per­haps, full of washed-​​out gravel ledges over mile-​​deep gorges, and bomb craters. Because the alter­na­tive “straight­for­ward” route sug­gested by Olivia Sue is an exhaust­ing roller­coaster of high-​​speed two-​​lane bends, flash­ing sun­light and shad­ows, and crazy moun­tain dri­vers. Puk­ing, and avoid­ing it, is a fre­quent sub­ject of con­ver­sa­tion as my motion-​​sick wife and I find places to pull over and take a breather.

Three hours later, we arrive.

Aggh. Must. Sleep. Hamp­ton Inn, Lewis­burg, WV. Aggh. Nice. Ow. Shon­eys. Fine. Eat there.

Ahh, the blessed obliv­ion expe­ri­enced by the dili­gent vaca­tioner. Noth­ing like it.

9:00am 21 June 2004 [429 miles] I am awak­ened this morn­ing by a vivid dream fea­tur­ing inte­rior design­ers of the Cal­i­for­nia mode, all short frosted hair and mus­cle shirts on the buff tan men, and low-​​slung tight black jeans and long straight hair on the busty women. For some rea­son we are hav­ing our house (well, not our house now, but our dream house of course) redec­o­rated, and are tak­ing bids, and so these peo­ple who are unques­tion­ably from some tele­vi­sion show or other are one of the bid­ders on the job. But for some rea­son they assume they already have the job, even though they are com­pet­ing against rea­son­able nor­mal folks who are not going to glue grass on the walls. I recall a mount­ing sense of frus­tra­tion and fail­ure to com­mu­ni­cate — they are clearly con­fused by the fact that I don’t want to be on tele­vi­sion, and couldn’t care less what peo­ple think. And then some one of them hands me a sched­ule. It cov­ers four days, and labels the wee hours of the day with things like “liv­ing room shots” and “inter­view with dec­o­ra­tor” and “own­ers paint­ing”. My out­rage at their pre­sump­tion mounts, and peaks (in a way that wakes me up) when I see the name of the dec­o­ra­tor who is going to be in charge of our house: Oval von Oval.

Remem­ber that name. It will be impor­tant later. Not in this nar­ra­tive, of course — I mean it’s just a cool name and should become impor­tant. Go ahead, use it. Make it so.

Any­way, today the vaca­tion is over. The day of work begins, and the sky begins to cloud up. Pil­ing omen upon omen, the Stu­dent Osteo­pathic Med­ical Asso­ci­a­tion has left a plas­tic dis­count card under our wind­shield wiper some­time dur­ing the night.

9:11am 21 June 2004 [443 miles] The Vir­ginia bor­der. The moun­tains are beau­ti­ful, even from the free­way — per­haps moreso because one is less prone to puk­ing on the gen­tler curves. But the gray sky looms low.

10:51am 21 June 2004 [532 miles] We pull into the park­ing lot of the Fron­tier Cul­ture Museum in Staunton to call JH and tell her we’re almost there. Mapquest gives us wrong street names (as usual), but we fol­low the spirit of the instruc­tions rather than the let­ter, and all seems well.

What, though, is the aban­doned ante­bel­lum build­ing that sits at the entrance to the Museum park­ing lot. A lost orphan­age, with its win­dows shot out? A hos­pi­tal for vet­er­ans of the Civil War? The set for a South­ern gothic ghost story?

We leave it for another time. A dif­fer­ent inves­ti­ga­tion. If you want to see it, just get off I-​​83 at the Staunton exit and turn west — you can’t miss it.

approx 11am 21 June 2004 [540 miles] We have arrived. JH and her hus­band meet us, and we all seem enthused about the process — they’re happy to see the books go and the money come in (though I note she’s now a Pow­erSeller on the basis of these books), and we’re get­ting Lots. Of. Old. Books.

JH leads us into their lit­tle house, and asks if we’re ready. Bar­bara and I laugh and smile and think (with a slight sense of fore­bod­ing) about how it is that we need to be “ready.” Is JH sim­ply respond­ing to our excite­ment? Or is there some­thing we haven’t planned for involved here, like a fray­ing rope bridge across a fiery chasm? I say some­thing like, “Sure! Let’s get started, shall we?”

Then JH opens the door to the room she’s been using to store the books.

This is the pig in the poke. You have to admit, it has that look, at least at first — a good deal of pig, and not a lit­tle poke, too.

Well, well, JH did tell me that there were enough to fill a twin bed­frame about five feet high. There’s the bed­frame to prove it. And, yes, I now can hear her insis­tence that they’d go into a pickup truck — which is fea­si­ble, if they’re stacked five feet high. Like the Bev­erly Hillbillies.

So erring on the side of cau­tion seems to have been a good idea, at this moment.

But there are many mixed feel­ings. Books, yes. Most of 2000, I think.

They don’t give a good first impres­sion. Stacked higgledy-​​piggledy in old, damp boxes. Dusty musty books in dank damp boxes. We learn from JH that she bought them at an estate auc­tion. The deceased had bought them when a local women’s col­lege (Fair­fax Hall) closed some years back, and he had stored them for a few more years in a num­ber of barns. She bought one barn-​​full a few months back, and has been sell­ing some of the choicer morsels since then. But she has no idea what’s in the pile, really, since she sortof started up near the top when they were brought into the room, after clear­ing out the worst rat-​​nibbled and bird-​​shat ones.

So we get what we get. Some of the good stuff is gone — but not all. Catch-​​as-​​catch-​​can.

Only fair! Just what I signed up for, I sup­pose. I sit down at her com­puter and pay her via Pay­Pal. Then we all gird our loins and stand around star­ing at the stack with our arms akimbo, and do all the other things peo­ple tend to do when sur­vey­ing a mess of hard work on a hot day, and even­tu­ally set to haul­ing. I recall scratch­ing my chin a few times, for instance. (It’s a guy thing.)

Time passes. We sweat. I rearrange the car. I stuff. I purge. I unpack and repack. I shake my head a lot. Bar­bara and JH and her hus­band box and haul and stack stuff and carry it out­side into the dri­ve­way. Finally, we reach a state of ulti­mate com­pres­sion — no more books will go into the car. Some few boxes are left behind, con­tain­ing children’s books and best­sellers, thank good­ness. Or I’d’ve had to strap them on the roof with Grannie.

Actu­ally, it’s lucky we didn’t bring any Grannies. Or the dog. Or thick clothes. This is what the car looks like, just before I slam the tail­gate. It is stacked within a foot of the inte­rior roof from the rear door to the back of the front pair of seats. It is sag­ging, since this many books weigh about a ton I’d guess.

It is also dusty and dirty and stinks of bird­shit and mildew and mice, frankly.

In all, it’s a won­der­ful, ter­ri­fy­ing prospect. It implies hor­rors and delights; tragic loss and great profit; intel­lec­tual amaze­ment and vast seas of dis­ap­point­ing trash.

After all, it’s lots of old books. Books are not merely the objects they are, but also the things they describe.

You have to expect a world-​​full of such stuff to weigh a lot. And pos­sess a bit of stink. Con­tained mul­ti­tudes, for exam­ple, are well-​​known stinkers….

1:16pm 21 June 2004 [543 miles] As we wave at JH and her hus­band and son and cats, who are great peo­ple and friendly as all get-​​out, and to whom I hope only the best befalls, the Bad First Impres­sion starts to kick in. There is a bit of smell. There is a deal of dust. Nobody has looked through these boxes for years, in some cases, and at least a few of them were exposed to ani­mals and filth.

What have we got? Is there any­thing in there worth saving?

Doubts are dan­ger­ous things. I mourn qui­etly to myself at the thought that we may have dri­ven twelve hours through the moun­tains to buy a ton of sil­ver­fish and bird­shit, just to haul it back through the same moun­tains to throw it in the dump.

2:25pm 21 June 2004 [580 miles] We pull into a Dairy Queen in Lex­ing­ton, WV to wash up (again, hav­ing washed up back at JH’s house), and have a snack, and pon­der what we’ve got our­selves into.

There’s dirt, and there’s dirt. Soil is a good dirt, earthy and ripe with pos­si­bil­ity. Dust like that we’re cov­ered with, though, well that’s aller­gic dirt, ripe only with the pos­si­bil­ity of sneez­ing and headaches and itch­ing eyes.

Noth­ing like wait­ing until you have a closed mini­van full of fero­cious aller­gens to make you appre­ci­ate the sim­ple ele­gance of the pickup truck. Would you rather have the win­dows closed and the air con­di­tion­ing sim­ply con­cen­trat­ing the bad smells and float­ing dust, or have the win­dows open and allow eddies and vor­texes to swirl it straight into your eyes and mouth?

A word of warn­ing to sen­si­tive bib­lio­ma­ni­acs: Buy loads of old books from dry locales. New Mex­ico, or peo­ple with radi­ant heat and not forced-​​air.

But we don’t really know it’s all crap, nei­ther lit­er­ally nor fig­u­ra­tively. Books, cov­ers, and judg­ing: you know what to do with those three things.

Our mod­er­ately gray mood is livened by a tasty Dairy Queen chokkit milk­shake, and also the sight of a cou­ple of middle-​​aged folks wear­ing the most stereo­typ­i­cal Gree­brier Golf Resort togs one can imag­ine. White shirts with logos. Khaki shorts. Sun­glasses on black cords. An SUV with a van­ity license. Lord, they have to be doctors.

Unless, of course, they’re den­tists.

3:23pm 21 June 2004 [648 miles] Back where we started in the morn­ing. Only later.

9:03pm 21 June 2004 [997 miles] We arrive back in Plain City. Dark­ness has fallen. Non­stop dri­ving since lunch. Aggh. Must. Sleep. Ow. &c &c

8:10am 22 June 2004 [997 miles] You real­ize, of course, that we can­not sim­ply take these books home with us. They have to be got­ten out of the boxes, cleaned, dried, sorted, dis­in­fected or washed as appro­pri­ate, and trashed if need be. So today and tomor­row shall be known ever­more as the Days of the Great Sort­ing.

And they are two days of rev­e­la­tion and dis­cov­ery. [If you’re tired of read­ing, you lazy bum, here: we do find trea­sure. Lots of it.]

So we set up shop in the garage — mainly by just offload­ing the boxes into a sin­gle layer on the floor and the ground when the floor is full. Jake, our Boston Ter­rier, finds them fascinating.

His opin­ion should con­vey a lot to the astute reader: Jake is a dog who rev­els in stinks and stenches, who rolls enthu­si­as­ti­cally in shits of all kinds, who enjoys a good bug-​​chase at least as much as any of us. He’s cap­ti­vated by these new objects, inves­ti­gat­ing them for most of an hour with lots of deep snork­ing infu­sions of eau de stinky book, like some sort of canine con­nois­seur. Bostons have short noses, and need to take deep draughts of air to get much out of them, so he runs his head all over the piles like a wine afi­cionado snort­ing glasses of wine at a tasting.

An afi­cionado who sneezes a lot.

Bar­bara and I just take drugs. Anti­his­t­a­mines. Decon­ges­tants. And wash a lot. Paper tow­els are every­where. As we han­dle the worst books, there is I con­fess some “eeew”-ing.

In the sun­light this morn­ing, it appears that we have some boxes that look very promis­ing, filled with clean, dry old valu­able books. And we also have some boxes that look and feel depress­ingly like mulch. Used mulch. We see leather-​​bound spines, but also mod­ern Books of the Month from library sales. We see sets and par­tial sets and pieces of other sets. We pick at the edges and see some very odd and excit­ing things. There are many small pieces, a jum­ble. A num­ber of small 12mo and 16mo black books, cloth-​​bound, on rag paper — which is good.

And also many very nasty things. All mixed up together — which is bad.

We need to take every god­damn one of them out of the boxes, look at them all, clean them all, and cull the sick and wounded. We enter triage mode.

When you’re doing book triage, each expe­ri­ence is dif­fer­ent. Unique sim­ple rules must be devel­oped to han­dle the prob­lems of every dif­fer­ent stack of old books, but there are stan­dards rules of thumb: First, any damp book gets trashed imme­di­ately. Any book with bird­shit on the pages, trashed imme­di­ately (the cov­ers can be cleaned, some­times). Also: books with live sil­ver­fish and fir­e­brats; books with no bind­ing or cov­ers; books miss­ing big chunks; books with white mildew thriv­ing on them; books that have been wet and dried into mate­ri­als resem­bling engi­neered wood prod­ucts more suit­able for build­ing (or per­haps sculp­tures). And books that smell of cat pee.

First box I open con­tains a good omen: The Repair­ing of Books.

Unfor­tu­nately, the good omen takes some time to kick in. Around lunchtime on Day One of the Great Sort­ing, I come across this les­son in ter­ror. Many of my read­ers are, I know, book peo­ple. “Book­worms,” yes? Some are per­haps flat­tered, like smart peo­ple who like to be thought of as “eggheads.”

Don’t be hasty. Have you ever seen what a book­worm does? As a human book­worm, you should be ter­ri­fied of the real thing, and offended by the moniker. Here are the front cover, a mid­dle page, and the back cover of a book devoured by book­worms. See this, ye bib­lio­philes, and expe­ri­ence true ter­ror. Note that the final image’s “blotty shape” is actu­ally a void about forty pages deep, and that the lit­tle holes my fin­gers are near in the sec­ond image pass through the entire book from front to back:

But these few items are noth­ing in the scope of the whole pile. Bar­bara and I spend much of both days crouched on fold­ing chairs in her par­ents’ dri­ve­way, mov­ing piles around, check­ing to see whether each vol­ume passes muster and is more or less unin­hab­ited. Any­thing that is par­tic­u­larly rare or valu­able wins tacit points, even if it har­bors a thriv­ing crop of mold or city of bugs, and is set in the noon­day sun to cook and dry.

After a few hours, it starts to dawn on me: It’s not that bad, after all. The num­ber of dead books is run­ning at around 1/​3, and of the remain­ing ²⁄₃ there are some unique and clean and lovely trea­sures. We take all care to keep them well away from the crit­ters, and wipe and de-​​smell them as much as possible.

You know, with a dab here and there, some sun, and maybe a lit­tle make-​​up, they’ll clean up real purty.

By the end of the first day we have made our way once through the whole intim­i­dat­ing stack.

If you’d asked me back at Dairy Queen I’d’ve said we would have to just haul them all straight to the dump. Now I know: We are not doomed! Even though our mus­cles ache and our minds are worn down with the inces­sant litany of, “Oh, look at this! A Ger­man book on the works of Plato!” “Oh, look at this, a bound vol­ume of 1870s sheet music, infested with sil­ver­fish! Aggh!” “Oh, wow, check out these Arts and Crafts gar­den­ing books!” “Damn damn damn damn, there are 45 of 46 vol­umes of this Waver­ley set!” &c &c And, of course, “Eeew. Ugh. Ick. Whew.”

Now then, a didac­tic word in your ear, gen­tle reader: Let us all pause a few moments to mourn the pass­ing of the greats shown in this pic­ture, some of which were in fact unique author-​​signed vol­umes, and par­tial sets of early 19^th-​​Century works, and illus­trated with cun­ning wood engrav­ings or chro­molith­o­graphs, or were even Book of the Month Club Spe­cial Selec­tions or 1960s high-​​school Eng­lish text­books…. But we can­not save every­body. All must, in their own time, die.

So at day’s end, exhausted, sore, and sun­burned (sil­ver­fish are not the only ones injured by ultra­vi­o­let and dry­ness), we gave it all up and sat sur­rounded by a pile of trash, and a pile of “keepers”.

I feel like a gen­eral after a very bad turn on the bat­tle­field: Thank­fully, the major­ity are still here with us today.

9:12am 21 June 2004 [add 144 more miles to account for the trip to the landfill]

Authors: reflect with care. Con­ceit and van­ity may lead you to imag­ine the final rest­ing place of your work as a well-​​dusted Uni­ver­sity library shelf, or a remain­der stack, or even (at worst) in a dec­o­ra­tive stack in a fur­ni­ture store. Nope. For these few hun­dreds, as with untold mil­lions more, the final rest­ing place is a com­bi­na­tion of (a) the guts of some bugs, and (b) the Buck­eye Waste SVC tip just north of Belle­fontaine, OH.

Day two of the Great Sort­ing will involve clean­ing as many as pos­si­ble of the healthy and wounded (as opposed to the dead, now buried). Metic­u­lously, each damp or buggy book must be sun-​​dried; each bird-​​limed cover care­fully chipped and wiped with a damp cloth (then dried); every filth­ily dusty cover and edge (six, recall) of every dusty tome wiped with a Swif­fer and a paper towel; each inte­rior page that has bird­seed or mouse drop­pings fluffed and puffed and flut­tered until it’s clean; each bookworm-​​eaten vol­ume exam­ined to see if the dam­age might be innocu­ous or severe. Triage, in other words, must go on.

Indeed, this is the day for Barbara’s main focus, the trea­sure I used to tempt her into the whole irre­deemably dirty act: the Project Guten­berg books. There are those books that had to be destroyed. There are those books that should be kept or sold. But there is a sad, ragged crew of books that are “com­plete”, but unde­sir­able, whether through mildew or miss­ing cov­ers or diverse inhab­i­tants. All yes­ter­day we set these aside, and today Bar­bara logs into the Guten­berg HQ and checks to see which (if any) are already present in the archive or logged for copy­right clear­ance. A sub­stan­tial stack pass muster, and so some­day soon we’ll rip them up and pass then fast (and fas­tid­i­ously) as pos­si­ble through the scan­ner so that their con­tents can be saved and passed along to posterity.

At the end of the day, we have all four­teen of the clean boxes (the 12” x 12” x 16” spe­cial book boxes from Uline), packed full of mis­cel­la­neous mostly-​​cleaned books that range from “good enough” to “wow”. There are about 100 books in the Guten­berg–wor­thy cat­e­gory, and we’ll just leave them here in Barbara’s par­ents’ garage. Another six to ten boxes’ worth of clean and dirty books remain.

About 1000 books, as I judge it. About 5% are scarce and rare and extremely desir­able. About 5% are com­mon­place, but nice enough to sell, for exam­ple early 1940s BOMC romances. But the rest, the big bulging mid­dle of the bell curve, we still have to research. Now that we know they’re nice, the remain­ing work is intel­lec­tual. Online. Detailed.

As for the future, well… At least some of that 5% of the neat stuff is mine. We went and got them. We paid for them. We’re fix­ing them up, as needed. And so we get to keep them. Because they’re cool as shit.

Some of the rest are Barbara’s, often some­what hurt or infested or infected but still con­tain­ing all the words and pic­tures, lost words of lost authors, little-​​known but well-​​regarded. So soon she’ll scan and share and post them, as time allows. There are some beauts in this frac­tion, too. Real trea­sure — not of the mon­e­tary sort, but rather the sort that makes you smile and teaches you about the way the world is. And was. Words learned and fool­ish, from women and men long dead and wrongly forgotten.

The rest? The rest are yours. Well, some­body else’s. They’ll help pay for the trip itself.

I’ll let you read­ers know about the auc­tions as they crop up. After all, you’re such a good reader any­way, hav­ing made it this far through a sim­ple trav­elog, that you deserve a spe­cial notice. As we crack open the clean boxes — the dis­in­fected and pest-​​controlled boxes, mind you! — we’ll let you know what anti­quar­ian trea­sures appear. They’re there. Because they’re still all in a jumble.

But it’s a clean jum­ble, now. And one with dis­tilled potential.

So, thank you, JH. Thanks very much. I’m pleased as punch. The pig in the poke turned out to be far bet­ter than it could have been. The bad is gone, the best is mine, and the rest is worth the effort.

Con­sider this the longest pos­i­tive feed­back you — or any other eBay user — has received.

A Dutch flower auc­tion runs (roughly) like this: The price for a lot starts at a high num­ber. At the begin­ning of the auc­tion, a large clock on the wall begins count­ing down — quickly — from the high price to lower and lower prices. The first bid­der to stop the clock agrees to pay the currently-​​shown price for the lot.

There are some details I’ve elided, like the fact that there are often mul­ti­ple items in a lot and thus bids are being made on por­tions, but let’s ignore that.

I’ve been look­ing for soft­ware to sell things on my web­sites using this sort of for­mat: I’d start a book, for exam­ple, at $50, and then every day the price would decre­ment by $1. Who­ever sent an email, or maybe sent money via Pay­Pal, would get the thing. Sim­ple, effi­cient, and nice.

So far, I can’t find any. The only stuff I can find is “reverse” auc­tion mod­ules for PHPAuc­tion and the like, which are not the same as Dutch flower-​​style auc­tions. And of course eBay has rede­fined the “Dutch” auc­tion to suit their own metaphor, a very dif­fer­ent ani­mal indeed.

Well, any­way, you know me by now. I had to break the assump­tions of the ele­gant, supremely effi­cient mar­ket­place a Dutch flower-​​style auc­tion pro­vides. Me, I can’t leave well enough alone.

Thus: the Drunkard’s auction.

• Before the begin­ning of the sale, the Seller of a Lot spec­i­fies a min­i­mum price he is will­ing to accept for the Lot, a max­i­mum price that seems rea­son­able, and a start­ing price.
• The Lot is offered openly on the mar­ket at the start­ing price.
• Peri­od­i­cally, the price of the Lot changes ran­domly, ris­ing or falling by a fixed (mul­ti­plica­tive) fac­tor, but bounded on the bot­tom by the min­i­mum price and bounded on the top by the max­i­mum price.
• Buy­ers may pur­chase the Lot at any time: first-​​come, first-​​served.

Sup­pose the mul­ti­plica­tive fac­tor is 9%. So if we start a lot at $77 with a floor of $30 and a ceil­ing of $120, then the asked price in the first period will be $77, in the sec­ond period it may be $70.07 or $83.93, in the third period it will be one of {$63.76, $76.38 (twice as often), $91.48}, and so forth.

Not as effi­cient as the decre­ment­ing Dutch flower-​​style auc­tion, is it? Dis­cuss, if it seems wor­thy of dis­cus­sion: strate­gies for buyer and seller (if any), how it might func­tion in mar­kets such as blogs in which cus­tomers are not sit­ting there anx­iously star­ing at clocks on the wall with their fin­gers poised over but­tons, and whether there might be more rea­son­able meth­ods of walk­ing (such as addi­tive incre­ments, or weighted prob­a­bil­i­ties of up– and down-​​ticks depend­ing on where in the price range the cur­rent price sits.

[Frankly, I lied when I said I was just sug­gest­ing this to break the assump­tions and see what hap­pens — I think this is an improve­ment over the decre­mented ver­sion exactly because of the asyn­chro­nous and low-​​volume mar­ket online sales expe­ri­ence. Plus it would appeal to mar­ket timers, who I sus­pect tend to buy more.)

I’m curi­ous to know whether there are snip­ing strate­gies in this or the Dutch flower-​​style sale, and whether these might be off­set by mak­ing the length of each period an i.i.d. ran­dom vari­able as well.

It also strikes me as some­thing a cron job and a Pay­Pal store­front might man­age to run hand­ily. Off to check that.…

Busi­ness Week has run an enthu­si­as­tic arti­cle tout­ing the com­ing age of Dig­i­tal Con­ver­gence. In a slash­dot com­ment on the thing, the old “your fridge will know when you need to order milk” trope is trot­ted out.

That’s a short-​​sighted idea that I’ve slapped around in pub­lic before, but I just real­ized that it was back before Notional Slurry when I was giv­ing work­shops and sem­i­nars and tuto­ri­als at OOPSLA and ASA/​MA and other con­fer­ences. So I thought, since I was reminded, I’d pass along what I tell my audi­ences and customers.

If you don’t know it, the “fridge orders your milk” trope most often crops up in con­ver­sa­tions regard­ing autonomous soft­ware agents and agent-​​based design. The story goes some­thing like, “In the future, every elec­tronic device (a) will be net­worked, and (b) will be con­trolled by an autonomous agent-​​based soft­ware sys­tem that com­mu­ni­cates through the ubiq­ui­tous net­work to other agents. So your agent-​​based fridge will, for exam­ple, read the bar­code on the milk when it gets put in, and keep track of when it is about to expire, and will either remind you to buy more or will order it for you.”

Strangely enough, my gripe is not that I don’t believe it. Indeed, I expect it will be lit­er­ally true in the near future — if only because every short-​​sighted gurulette has heard it and passed it on to Mar­ket­ing a dozen times at over the last decade. If you can’t buy a modem equipped or Blue­tooth milk-​​aware fridge from Hammacher-​​Schlemmer in the next cou­ple of years, I’ll make you eat your hat.

But, if I may say so, it’s the most irre­deemably bor­ing vision of the future I’ve heard for sev­eral decades. My fridge will order my milk? Thou­sands of man-​​hours of research and thought by dili­gent cre­ative grad stu­dents and tech­ni­cians and a few pro­fes­sors leads to the dis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion of the fuck­ing shop­ping list indus­try? What hap­pens to all the innu­mer­able real advances in multi-​​agent sys­tems, smart mate­ri­als, affec­tive com­put­ing, and ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing? We for­get them, like the peo­ple in the Star Trek uni­verse all for­got how to use an auto­matic pilot or a com­puter tar­get­ing system?

You want to know when agent-​​based design is here? Not when my fridge reads bar­codes. No, it goes like this:

My milk will sense it’s not feel­ing well, and will chat with the fridge and maybe ask it have a look-​​see with its extra senses and bring its extra smarts to bear, or ask some friends. Together they con­coct a plan to rem­edy the sit­u­a­tion. Maybe they do some chem­istry. Maybe they develop some anti­bod­ies. Maybe they try to talk the bac­te­ria out of their harsh­ness, con­vert to a nice com­mu­nal yoghurt and seek a per­ma­nent exis­tence as a col­lec­tive, nur­tured and sup­ported by the shel­ter­ing fridge. The least they can do is see it off to a noble end, with a lit­tle dig­nity, and make arrange­ments to take care of its progeny.

Agent-​​based engi­neer­ing and design won’t really be here, except as a wannabe imma­ture field or a suite of design pat­terns, until some­thing like that comes to pass. And if you really attend to how the research is going and how we can make things hap­pen already, this one is just as inevitable as the fridge scenario.

Screw the dis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion of tra­di­tional adver­tis­ing, the intro­duc­tion of dis­rup­tive tech­nolo­gies to elec­tron­ics con­sumers, and the enabling of net­worked hard­ware for ubiq­ui­tous seam­less e-​​commerce.

No, I’ll be sat­is­fied with noth­ing less than the dis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion of design itself, and the empow­er­ment of stuff.