In a follow-up to yesterday’s Transworld trade show post, here’s a guy that has a collection of over 150 Halloween animatronic props.
His animatronic collection may or may not have been more expensive than my book collection to acquire, but I’m pretty sure it’s significantly more expensive to store…
Time for a walk through of this year’s Transworld Halloween trade show. These are always a lot of fun.
Bigger-than-life animatronic figures seem to be a continuing theme (and Sam’s has had one or two such for sale the last few years), including a number of oversized werewolves, and my neighborhood has several Gashadokuro this year. There was also a number of high quality giant spiders on display.
Time for some real-life horror. How about disturbing mining disasters?
As difficult and dangerous as working in an underground mine is now, it was a lot worse in the 19th century. At the Snaefell zinc mine on the Isle of Man, a government inspector had passed the mine’s ventilation just two days before some 36 miners descended into the mine on May 9, 1897. 19 would never return, overcome by carbon monoxide.
Much closer to the present day, the Val Reef’s gold mine in South Africa is one of the deepest in the world. On May 10, 1995, an underground locomotive used to haul gold and other things raced out of control and plunged into an elevator shaft hauling 104 miners up to the surface after their shift, The elevator plunged more than 1,500 feet to the bottom of the shaft…where the recirculating pumps pulled in and redistributed a fine mist of the slain miner’s blood all over the mine.
That video ends with a look at another fascinating but horrifying disaster: The Great Boston Molasses Flood.
Remember a few years ago when I posted the video of the vanlife gamer guy playing a horror video game at night, alone, in a cave?
Well now he has a video of him in an off-grid tower in the woods, where he plays a horror video game about a vanlife guy in an off-grid tower in the woods.
Enjoy the horrifying inception!
Three more very cheap purchases from that storage locker sale:
Not a bad haul for $1.50…
Three used books, two of which were bought extremely cheaply.
Another Tachyon Lansdale first.
Lansdale, Joe R. In The Mad Mountains. Tachyon, 2024. First edition trade paperback original, a Fine copy. Stories inspired by H. P. Lovecraft.
I will have copies of this available in the next Lame Excuse Books catalog.
Another Borderlands Little Book:
Doyle, Arthur Conan (Mark W. Whitback, editor). A Little Orange Book of Odd Orchestrations Borderlands Books, 2024. First edition hardback, #463 of 500 copies signed by the editor, a Fine copy, sans dust jacket, as issued. Fantastic stories, several of which are covered in Bleiler’s Supernatural Fiction, pages 159-161, and Bleiler’s Science Fiction: The Early Years, pages 203-209. Part of their “Past Masters of Horror and Fantasy” series, focusing on late 19th/early 20th century writers.
I will have a small number of copies available in the next Lame Excuse Books catalog.
This is another item from that third major Zelazny purchase that I’ve finally gotten around to adding to my library.
Somtow, S. P. (AKA Somtow Sucharitkul). Valentine. Gollancz, 1992. First edition hardback, a Fine copy in a Fine dust jacket, with a signed bookplate laid in. Second book in the Vampire Junction trilogy (and I already had a first of Vampire Junction, also with signed bookplate laid in). The Gollancz edition precedes the U.S. edition by about six months.
Two more signed Lansdale firsts, one I got him to inscribe to me at his signing at Book People here in Austin on Friday, July 19, the other a lettered edition I was previously unaware of that I bought directly from the publisher.
I didn’t scan the traycase because the design is identical to the book.
Reminder: Through it’s sold out from the publisher, I still have copies of the signed/numbered edition of Dark Kin available at cover price.
In addition, Joe also signed the few books I had by him that he hadn’t already, including Apache Witch, The Gonzo Tapes, Mule Tales and Cody’s Army.