flattering, but maddening too

From a reader:

“… a few months ago you said in your blog that you very much doubted that anybody would pay $150.00 for a paperback copy of your Heidegger book. Well, I did and regard it as money well spent (some context; lots of linguistics and logic monographs are in that neighborhood; maybe with the exception of ‘Introduction to Montague Semantics’ your book is a lot more valuable to me than any of those).”

Very kind of you. But for those who are reading this, all of my books are still available at reasonable prices straight form the publishers. Amazon is playing some politics about print-on-demand that keeps the prices of my books artificially high on their site from time to time.

Just go to the “Books” page above, and click on any of the titles of the already published books. Those links will take you to the Open Court (or re.press) pages for those four books.

As far as overpaying for books… In a sense I’ve done it many times, since all of the Heidegger Gesamtausgabe volumes are somewhat overpriced. But they’re not outrageously priced. Only three times do I remember paying outrageous prices for something, and two were books…

1. 1998, sudden death playoff game for wildcard spot, San Francisco Giants at Chicago Cubs. Wrigley Field. I walked into a legal ticket broker office near Wrigley and paid $100 for a standing room ticket. All the guys standign next to me had somehow gotten theirs for $45 or $50.

The only thing I remember about the game itself was the late Rod Beck getting the save for the Cubs (who went on to get pounded by Atlanta in the real playoff series anyway, but that was the big Kerry Wood/Sammy Sosa year, and the Cubs seemed lucky at the time).

But as for the crowd, there was a smartalecky, extremely drunk young male standing in our midst. For some reason he kept smiling and putting his arm around this towering Hell’s Angels guy who was also standing with us, and who was increasingly enraged each time it happened. We did our best to move the young gentleman far away from the biker before he was knocked out with a single punch. We succeeded in preventing bloodshed.

2. Paid $110 for a thin Nijhoff paperback through Amazon: a book I knew I would love, and did.

3. Paid $95 for an atrocious book, but one I needed to read in order to attack it for a project that was coming due soon.