2008 River City Reading Festival (I'll Be There)

Make your plans now to attend the 2008 River City Reading Festival in downtown Lawrence, Kansas from 10 am - 4am on Saturday, September 27th. The festival is a great place to discover new authors, get your books signed by well-established authors (Thomas Frank, Scott Phillips, Kansas Poet Laureate Denise Low, Nancy Pickard, etc.), attend poetry workshops, mystery writing workshops, bring your kids for the day (plenty of children's authors and activities available), and of course, come visit me in the Authors Tent, where I will once again be doing my version of the Antiques Roadshow, where people come to have their rare and not-so-rare books evaluated. I will have a few interesting items available for sale and will be selling copies of my new informational book about books. Admission is free.

Here is a link to the Festival website and a picture of me presenting at last year's event:

http://rivercityreadingfestival.org/



Here is a link to last year's post on the event:

http://www.lowestcostbooks.com/archive/2007_10_01_archive.html

Featured Bizarre Book #2- Timothy Leary's Multilevel Measurement (A Rare Book With An Interesting Owner)

It is always a treat to offer for sale a copy of a book which is the only one of its kind currently available in the world.

When the author happens to be a man whose remains were sent into outer space and who was the face of psychedelic research and the 60's counter-culture movement, the story behind this book gets even more interesting.

When the books' publication date (1956) predates all of his other publications listed on his Wikipedia bibliography (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_leary) the price tag tends to soar a bit (I have listed this one for sale at the initial price of $2,000, which should only go up). Was this Timothy Leary's first book, published just after his dissertation?

And finally, when the previous owner's name is written on the top right hand corner of the front cover, and just happens to read "Jim Nabors" the book becomes TRULY BIZARRE.

What I have here is Gomer Pyle's copy of LSD proponent Timothy Leary's first book. By doing a little basic research and Google-ing their names together, I found that they are both Alumni of the University of Alabama (Leary received his Bachelor's Degree in psychology from there after dropping out of the US Military Academy at West Point). Although perfect provenance may be nearly impossible to verify as both men are now deceased, I was able to conduct some basic visual research on Nabors' signature for sale on Ebay, and it became apparent that what I have is truly a one-of-a-kind book.

You can view the book for sale here:
FEATURED BIZARRE BOOK #2

Serious inquiries will be answered promptly, and a 15% discount applies to any libraries or institutions interested in obtaining this volume, including the University of Alabama library.