More books I probably won’t read for years at this rate

Before we crack on with the next book, there’s a few finds I should update the blog with. Twitter followers will have seen a few of these already I believe, but I’ve managed to get four separate additions to my collection.

Oxfam Books continues to be a rich vein and has given me three books across two different finds. One was a gift aid book in the form of Eye of the Dragon.

Oxfam again came through with a more diverse and exciting show of green-spines, several of which I already had in my collection, but there were gaps to be filled by Crypt of the Sorcerer and Return to Firetop Mountain.

And most recently this weekend, surprisingly, a random wandering through Poundland to buy a cheap pair of pliers and a lightbulb resulted in the unexpected sight of Mr. Ian Livingstone’s name!

Oh how I long to read some books written by that man! Anyway, like I said, Seas of Blood coming soon… although I do need to get Pillars of Eternity finished before Dark Souls 3 appears so do bear with me!

No, really. Soon.

Hidden artifacts stashed within an Oxfam shop

Just a small morsel for you to nibble on before the next book comes up, something I found a long time ago in an Oxfam book shop. A small crop of titles I already owned were on the shelves, but I do love to see if there is anything written on the adventure sheets so I had a look inside. What I found was that the owner of these books had left in a hand drawn map for City of Thieves as well as his own inventory sheets for City of Thieves, Forest of Doom and Space Assassin!

Much better than the kind of crap I churn out! Seems he had some great luck on rolling his main stats too 😉

 

How will you catch the Demon Fish?

Just a quick update here, very excited today to find this in Oxfam Books!

 

The Tasks of Tantalon, a Steve Jackson off-shoot based around visual puzzles it seems. I have never even seen the book before, let alone read it, so I’m fairly blind as to what I have here. Safe to say, I’m very happy to have got the hardback version for £2.99! I’m not sure if it will work for a read-through at some point but I will see what I can do…

Oxfam bringing joy once again

A short while ago I had a fairly major find in Canterbury Oxfam and today I had a similarly big hit in the Oxfam Books shop just down the road from that place. My eyes lit-up when I saw a thick section of green in the kids titles, curiously some brown too which I’m unfamiliar with…

 

The Warlock of Firetop Mountain was a very early edition, I think it only listed the first three titles as being available in the series, but I left that on the shelf for some other lucky person. And although I have yet to add Appointment With FEAR to my collection, I’m not after the Wizard editions so that stayed there too, Freeway Fighter I have recently acquired on eBay as it’s my next book to read at the time of writing… so what did I actually pick up in the end?

 

Handily, with these books I’ve filled an imminent gap, with my collection now taking me almost up to book 22, Robot Commando, ironically with Appointment With FEAR being the only title missing up to that point. As with my previous big haul, these books appear to be from an abandoned collection once owned by a ‘Lionel Cornish’. Seems Mr. Cornish once held these books in great esteem, writing ‘KEEP OFF’ on one inside cover, but then reduced his interest to the point of being willing to accept £1.95 for it.

 

Well, they’re mine now, Cornish. All mine.

 

A realised fantasy

A long while has passed since I had a good charity shop find, but as my Twitter and Facebook peeps already know, yesterday you could say I made up for that. By now I can scan up and down a shelf of books and tell you if there’s a Fighting Fantasy title there within a second or two, what I wasn’t expecting from Canterbury Oxfam was for the whole shelf to be made up of Fighting Fantasy books!

I haven’t seen the like since the early 90’s! Needless to say I was taking a picture of the display within seconds and rifling through to pick out my share of the loot. I should point out that these are all Fighting Fantasy books too, not just the face of the shelf. Despite this though, I only came away with six books as a lot of the titles were ones I already own, although it does seem somewhat ungrateful of my luck to say ‘only’. I believe the titles I left on the shelf were Warlock of Firetop Mountain, Sky Lord, Creature of Havoc, Island of the Lizard King, Trial of the Champions, Star Strider, Caverns of the Snow Witch…. and in my excitement I forgot the others.

What did I walk out with, then?

All in really good condition too, the adventure sheets haven’t been touched and there is barely a crease or dog-ear to be seen.

So, where the hell has this mother-load come from? It seems that someones old collection has been taken out of storage and dumped into an Oxfam shop and kept together as a job-lot, you see each book has a name written on the inside cover, ‘R. Bennett’. There is also a number written, a different one on each book, so maybe he numbered them as he read them? I don’t know, but whoever you are Mr. Bennett, I hope you don’t end up regretting giving them away. And if you do, you could always start a blog…