Tales of Astonishing Thrift!

Among my various little-known bad habits is an addiction to thrift stores.

It might be an outgrowth of the inveterate collector’s lack of impulse control, or the lure of finding the lost Antique Roadshow jackpot; or maybe it’s having way too much time on my hands– and a bit too much room to fill up. Whatever the reason, about once a week, I make the rounds to a handful of shops within a five-mile radius of my house, gleaning from them a trove of personal treasures, incredible bargains and occasional amazing finds.

My usual run nets me a random assortment of memorabilia, gadgets, trinkets, books and various other miscellanea. Some gets kept for the permanent collection, while most eventually gets eBayed once I bore of them.

Among my finds (and sales):

• a 1974 Rollei 35T in perfect working order for $4– sold to a camera buff in Japan for $120;
• a 1978 Parker Brothers Merlin (as seen on a recent episode of My Name is Earl) for 99 cents– won by a nostalgic woman in California for around $20;
• a signed copy of Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams for $3 — bought by a fan in Maine for $51;
• an official crew hat from the defunct Chris Isaak Show, $1 — went to a Californian for $20.

The nephew of one of my favorite writers, E. L Doctorow– Cory Doctorow, an excellent writer and thinker in his own right — described the addiction to, well, “one man’s junk” in his fanciful story, “Craphound“, which became his first professional work in print, and the domain he chose for his various musings. Cory is a self-professed addict, and lived in a warehouse while in Toronto, which he stocked with a tiki lounge and wall full of sputnik clocks.

“What is a craphound?”

“You’re lookin’ at one. You’re one, too, unless I miss my guess. You’ll get to know some of the local craphounds, you hang around with me long enough. They’re the competition, but they’re also your buddies, and there’re certain rules we have.”

And, too, I fondly recall the classic episode “Gather Ye Acorns” of Steven Spielberg’s 80s anthology series Amazing Stories in which a a young boy is visited by a mischievous gnome who counsels him to “never throw away anything you love, even if your mother tells you to, because there’s treasures galore in there.” It’s been twenty years since that episode aired, and in that time, I’ve had a number of things I should have kept disappear, thrown out to the junk heap of lost memories. I think that for many of us the true value in such memorabilia is how it allows us, if for just a moment, to recapture our youth, to revisit another time and place.

Addendum: Cory has written that he’s not actually related to E.L. Doctorow. I was going on the “I read it somewhere” principle of erroneous fact-checking. Apparently, it’s a common enough assumption that E.L. himself was asked it, in a Washington Post Q&A:

New York, N.Y.:
Are you aware of the work of Cory Doctorow (his bio), whom I’ve read is a distant relative of yours? He’s an up and coming writer of science fiction and technology journalism. Do you use the internet in your own writing, whether in the world of the characters, or for your own research, or as a source of literary criticism and thought?

E.L. Doctorow: Apparently he’s a young Canadian science fiction writer whom I have never read. When I was giving a reading in Toronto or Montreal, his parents came by to suggest our connection. For all I know we may be related distantly but I have no way of checking that out.

Thanks for the correction and for reading my random scrawlings, Cory!