Adventures in thrifting: “Ayn, rhymes with swine”

I don’t remember when I caught the thrift shopping bug. It was probably around the time I got my first turntable. Like any kid just starting a record collection, the first thing I did was raid my parent’s record collection. Eventually I got bored of my dad’s Neil Young and Baja Marimba Band records, so I went out looking for new stuff. For some reason, I ended up visiting thrift stores more than the local used record store. Probably because I could snag a playable copy of Miles Davis’ “Kind of Blue” for two bucks.

After a while, I realized there was a lot more than just records at thrift stores. Some stuff – pots, glassware, puzzles missing pieces – I really didn’t care about. Other stuff fascinated me. The clothes, for example, were a mishmash of musty, dusty, moth-eaten and like-new.  A lot of crap really, but every so often, I might find a Pringle sweater or an awesome pair of saddle shoes.

As a soon learned, it’s a lot of digging, but that was part of the interest. I remember reading an article in Salon about scavenging (which is really a whole other business) that accurately articulated the feeling:

“Instead of going out and getting what you want, like a regular shopper, you accept and even delight in whatever you happen to find.”

Or, in another sense, the thrifting aesthetic mirrors the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi, which asserts that one can’t penetrate the veil of existence to understand the manifest permanence of divinity. At best, one can perceive the imperfections around him or herself and accept the absolute beauty present in this tangible world, which is most commonly evoked through the imperfections, impermanence and incompleteness of life. To thrift with glee then is to disregard the minor faults of gently-used goods and see the life still left within a perfectly good dart board, tape deck or set of free weights.

Without over-thinking it too much, I think my point is there is some benefit to letting something other than your immediate desires guide you as a consumer. One should not become attached to things, but there is something very human about creating relationships with inanimate objects. And thrifting imbues consumerism with an odd sense of discovery, which in turn creates personal value.

Example: I have a deeper relationship with my tattered copy of William Steig’s “The Lonely Ones” than I do with the copy of “Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip, Volume One” I bought from Amazon a few months back. I like both artists equally and each book does a different thing for me. But I’d be more hesitant to let go of that worn-out Steig book than the pristine Jansson collection. I bought it in a dusty warehouse over a year ago and my attachment is plain sentimentality, but it feels honest enough to me to add value to the book.

Beyond that, there’s also the randomness of finding something you never knew existed in the first place. Which brings me to the picture above. This week, I had some time to kill before meeting some friends at the Skatalites concert in Sacramento earlier this week. On my way to the show, I just happened to drive by a Goodwill store that I hadn’t visited in a while.

I decided to stop and check out the books. Typical fare, mostly. You can always find a copy of “We Were the Mulvaneys,” “Middlesex,” “A Million Little Pieces” or “Daughter of Fortune” (in case you were wondering, the common thread: Oprah) in any given thrift store. In between these and copies of Nicholas Sparks novels, I noticed a particularly fat book. It was a hardcover copy of “Atlas Shrugged,” which I found odd because if you find a copy of an Ayn Rand book in a thrift store, it’s usually a yellowed paperback reprint from the 1970s.

My personal distaste for Rand aside, I decided to take a closer look at this chunky tome. The cloth was a shade darker than cerulean and the front was embossed with a gold foil “A” and “R.” It was a good-looking book. But the limitation page is what really sparked my attention. The inscription read, “This special tenth anniversary edition is limited to two thousand copies, signed by the author.” And below those words was Rand’s simple signature.

At first, I didn’t think much of it. A fascinating curio, but I’m no book collector. Yet, my curiosity got the best of me. What exactly is a limited edition copy of “Atlas Shrugged” signed by the author worth?

Enough, I guess.

If there’s one other thing about thrifting I’d like to note, it’s that after you do it for some time, you begin to develop an eye for the diamond in the rough. Thanks to that, I have a very collectable paper weight sitting on my desk.