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Rich, if you find another copy, I'll take it.

Big Life Changes and My Wine Cellar In addition to comics, the other thing I collect is wine. Recently we sold our family home where we raised our four kids, as our youngest is starting college in September (so my wife and I are now empty nesters). Just last week, we moved to our little house by the beach. Big life changes for us! There are a lot of emotions when you move from a house and area that you've lived for 20+ years. For the last couple weeks, I've been thinking things like "this is the last time I'll drive down this road" and "this is the last time I'll be in this store." And then you see your youngest child graduate from high school. Whew ... big life changes. Anyway, we plan to live in this house for the rest of our lives. This beach house has the comic room that I've been showing in this thread. But with moving, we had to build a new wine cellar to store my wine collection. We've been working on that since last October, and now it's finally done! The excitement of the new wine cellar has helped me get over the melancholy of moving and my youngest child on the brink of going to college. At the moment, I have about 1700 bottles of wine. My collection focuses on Italian wines (brunellos, barolos, and barbarescos), California (mostly Napa), Bordeaux, and pinot (both new world and old -- Burgundies). I also have small concentrations of amarones and petite syrah. I should actually say OUR collection, as my wife and I both collect this wine. This is different from my comic collection, where my wife isn't into it. So it's nice to be able to collect something we're both into. The new wine cellar is temperature controlled and stays at a constant 55 degrees. It holds over 2000 bottles, so we have some room for growth. I decided early on that I wanted to showcase some art in the new cellar. In particular, I have a few limited/signed prints by the Scottist artist, Jack Vettriano. As you can see, the art is suggestive, which shouldn't surprise anyone who has seen the comics I collect in this thread. And before you ask, my wife is okay with it, she likes Vettriano. Here are some pictures of my new wine cellar. Thanks for reading.

Hi Mollie, Would you please add this comic to the Dave Stevens Covers set? This set includes comics with either front or back covers by Dave Stevens. For this comic, the front cover is by Linsner, but the back cover is by Dave Stevens. Pics of both the front and back covers are below. Thanks!

Here are a few recent additions to the comic room. First, a couple of items with covers by Dave Stevens. I have the top ranking Dave Stevens registry set. It's always a quandary for me when I pick up things like this, about whether to submit to CGC. I know the grades will be low, but it's unlikely I'll ever be able to get better copies (especially for this foreign magazine), and I want to use the registry set as an index of covers by Dave Stevens. So I'll probably go ahead and submit them. Speaking of Stevens, here's a book that I got back from CGC recently, that I plan on adding to the set. You might ask, how can this qualify for the Dave Stevens cover set, when the cover is by Linsner? Well, because this set includes both front and back covers. And the back cover is by Stevens: I also recently picked up Junie Prom 6. I'll be submitting this to CGC too, as I'm trying to put together an entire CGC run of Junie. Here's my Junie run so far:

Looks like a fun time. Where was it? Is it inside the casino?

take ZOOT Comics #8 CGC 2.5 (1947) Matt Baker cover and art. $90

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I'll take this, thanks Rick!

Serendipity and a Book for the Lady In White Collection I'm always finding books I've never seen before when going through long boxes at cons, or surfing on the Internet. Even today, after almost 50 years of collecting, it's still exciting to discover something new. Serendipity is a big part of comic collecting! That's how it is for me with the Lady in White collection. I stumble onto books that fit the collection. Here's a comic I discovered at Terry's con earlier this year in January. Unexpected 127. The dealer had a raw copy priced at $45. I think he was surprised when I passed on it. I would have bought it but I was unsure of the grade. It went on my want list though, and a few months later, this graded copy appeared on eBay. I got it for $90, a steal IMHO. This way I didn't have to pay for grading, or risk getting a lower grade. Thanks for reading.

Sounds like you had a fun day. What'd you get at Joe Jost’s? We need a picture of lunch! Love the narrow house. But this beats it, the narrowest house in Valencia Spain (107 cm).

Some Recent Books from CGC Got some books back from CGC. I've been looking for a nice copy of Rangers 28 for years. Finally found one here on the boards. This is one of my favorite covers of Rangers. And, I got Young Love 4 to add to my GA photo covers collection.

I think I read some place that being in the slab presses the book to some extent. So, if you re-grade it, the book gets the benefit of that press and might nudge it up a grade higher. Not sure if that's true, but I wonder about it in cases like this one, where the grade went from 6.0 and 6.5. Although, I also think that this shows the subjective nature of grading, especially for fine lines like 0.5 of a grade.

Another Cross-Over Book: Millie the Model 7 Here's another book I sent in for CGC's crossover program, Millie the Model 7. CBCS has it at 6.0. CGC brought it up to 6.5. I wonder if being in a slab works to press the book, and that's why sometimes the grade goes up. I also wonder if the CGC grader gets to see the other company's grade prior to grading -- does anyone know? I asked this to a CGC rep once (via email), but didn't get an answer (it's possible the rep didn't understand my question and I didn't press it).

My wife and I are on vacation, on a Mediterranean cruise. So that's where all my money is going lately, instead of buying comics. Like here about comics, sometimes I post a log of our vacations. Here's a link, to anyone who's interested (especially if you like reading about food and travel): https://boards.cruisecritic.com/topic/2652742-tr-seabourn-11-day-mediterranean-islands-odyssey-may-2019/

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If you like that, you'd really like my Action 1 box. I have a Detective 1 box too, but unfortunately no Detective 27 box.

UVA pulled off another miracle win last night, so I'm happy! I also got a great Manhattan at the bar we watched the game at. This one was smokey, and had a slice of bacon. Bacon makes anything 10x better!

As I wait for UVA to play Auburn, I'll post a few more recent pics of my comic room. In 4 hours I'm going to be either really happy or sad.

More recent pictures from my comic room:

Ha!

Big Matt Baker Win Last Night! I won this on eBay last night. It's a Baker you don't see often. I put in a fairly high max bid, but was still surprised to win it. UVA wins, Duke loses and now I win this auction -- it's been a good week! I also won this Wild Boy on eBay last week. So with these 2 pickups, I now have 173 Matt Baker covers. This is 58% towards my goal of getting a copy of every comic with the cover by Baker. By my count, there are 298 Baker covers (although I include in my list some magazines and books that are reprints). So I still have 125 to go. I have about 8 years of active collecting before I retire. So can I get 16 a year for 8 years to finish this collection? Not sure. It's not even a money thing -- you can have all the money in the world (which I don't), but if the comics aren't offered for sale, there's nothing you can do about it. But it would be kind of cool, to someday auction all 298 comics on C-Link or Heritage. Maybe I'd do it as a single lot, just for the fun of it. Or maybe I'll donate them all to where I went to school, UVA. It would be something to see all 298 displayed at the same time in the library where I spent so many hours studying, way back when, among the frat boys and pretty sorority girls. It would be like, the geeks win in the end.

With my daughter living in LA now, it's alot easier for me to travel to LA.

Bob - Great report! Some day I hope to make it to this con. I was close last year and then life intervened. What a great life you have! Sun, paperback show, sun, Wonder Con, sun, outdoor flea markets, sun ... glad you had a good time.