{"id":35486,"date":"2026-07-19T08:02:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-19T13:02:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=35486"},"modified":"2026-07-18T14:20:17","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T19:20:17","slug":"good-hunting-july-17-2026-abc-books-and-relics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/19\/good-hunting-july-17-2026-abc-books-and-relics\/","title":{"rendered":"Good Hunting, July 17, 2026: ABC Books and Relics"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Well, it wasn&#8217;t <em>that<\/em> good in terms of purchases, but perhaps that&#8217;s actually better for me.  James R. Wilder was coming for an early book signing&#8211;both in that he&#8217;s usually here in December and because the signing was at 10:00am.  I took my oldest, who wanted to stop for lunch and go to the Ross department stores in town (both of them) as well.  But with a belly full of sushi and vegetable egg fu yung, he kinda demurred on going to both locations of the department store&#8211;especially as the southeast location was a zoo.  But we stopped by Relics, briefly, in a search for a gift for my mother-in-law&#8217;s upcoming birthday (not for my beautiful wife, whose birthday is a week later&#8211;I have her covered pretty well, no <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/18\/i-know-it-was-you-roku-you-broke-my-heart\/\" target=\"_new\">Facebook-advertised catchkes<\/a> involved).<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s what I got:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/gmh07182026.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>I got: <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The new Wilder book, <em>River City P.I.<\/em>, which takes place far later than the other Harbison mysteries and focuses on a relative of Chet Harbison, the main character of the other books, who becomes a part-time investigator in Cape Girardeau.  I managed to only talk to Wilder for a couple of minutes, <em>and<\/em> I sold him a copy of <em>John Donnelly&#8217;s Gold<\/em>.  I&#8217;m pretty sure my best sales tactic is to jam authors whose books I buy at ABC Books&#8211;I think <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2026\/06\/07\/good-book-hunting-saturday-june-6-2026-abc-books\/\" target=\"_new\">Mr. C.<\/a> also bought a copy.  Also, he mentioned his cover guy does the covers and layouts for his books for $400, which hopefully means that he&#8217;s selling hundreds of copies of each book.  Good on &#8216;im.<\/li>\n<li><em>The Book of Five Rings<\/em> by Miyamoto Musashi.  Yes, gentle reader, I have bought this book from ABC Books and <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2021\/02\/07\/book-report-the-book-of-five-rings-by-miyamoto-musashi-1643-1645-2005\/\" target=\"_new\">have already read it<\/a>.  But this is a really pretty book, only $7.95 for a hard copy with a pretty dust jacket.  So I will read it again.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>At Relics, I stopped at the new record booth with the jazz records I found <a href=\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2026\/07\/04\/good-album-hunting-july-3-2026-the-remaining-relics-gift-certificate\/\" target=\"_new\">earlier this month<\/a>, and I looked through the last part of the alphabet.  I got <em>Tell It Like It Is<\/em> by Stacy Rowles with Jimmy Rowles.  It&#8217;s a woman playing trumpet.  I cannot get in trouble buying an album like that.  I didn&#8217;t find the gift I was looking for, so I might be back or prowling other venues this week.<\/p>\n<p>So, thirty bucks and another forty for a buffet lunch.  And some of the rapidly diminishing time with my oldest son.  Which is worth more, even though I am unlikely to remember this particular excursion.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Well, it wasn&#8217;t that good in terms of purchases, but perhaps that&#8217;s actually better for me. James R. Wilder was coming for an early book signing&#8211;both in that he&#8217;s usually here in December and because the signing was at 10:00am. I took my oldest, who wanted to stop for lunch and go to the Ross [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35486"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35488,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35486\/revisions\/35488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}