Snake America Thirty Eight
Snake is a bi-weekly magazine covering for-sale goods, generally, though not always, on eBay. This week, a clodhopper Rock Crawler and 1920s comix correspondence courses.
Kijiji: Rock Crawler/Mud Bogger for trade: To add to the ever-growing list of whimsical and special things heretofore unknown, there's a un-Wikipedia-able Jeep Rock Crawler on Kijiji, the Canadian Craigslist (owned by eBay) available for trade only. The owner, out of Tweed, Ont., lists the specs:
yj jeep body
355 chev motor
350 tranny
205 divorced case
44 dana front
60 rear
4 link in back, srings in front
cross over steering
new 8000 warn winch
38 cut boggers or 35 uncut boggers
Not sure what any of that means. I think "sring" is a typo--though I can't be sure. I am also not sure whether 38 cut boggers or 35 uncut is the better deal. I do like that he abbreviated Chevy to "chev."
Here's a better pic of the Rock Crawler:
Grammatical cues like the all-caps trade demand (WILL TRADE FOR POLARIS RAZOR OR OLD MUSCLE CAR OR AN OLDER TRUCK I HAVE OVER 12000 IN THIS JEEP), finger the author as probably the old guy and not his son. There's no Jeep.com page on either the Rock Crawler or Mud Bogger; there aren't any dedicated message boards or fan communities for anything more specific than general off-roading. Tweed is a town of about 6,000 that once unsuccessfully applied to get a CFL franchise in a Green Bay-type deal. I'm not sure the owner is going to get good trade value in his small city. It didn't work very well for me in a bigger city. In 2004, I had an idea to sell "Yale Sucks" T-shirts outside the 2004 Harvard-Yale football game. (The money from my old line, selling "Yankees Suck" T-shirts outside Fenway during home games and through the World Series, was starting to run dry.) My boss AJ printed up two cases of shirts, 144, medium through extra-extra large, funny bulldog logo. Three of us, AJ and my friend Wayne, went out in the rain to the corner of Memorial Drive and JFK, on the far end of the bridge coming from Harvard Stadium with our boxes. It only took a couple minutes before we saw we may not have made the right decision. Plenty of attendees were in tweeds and would be made to look foolish in a T-shirt. The few who did buy T-shirts thought we were Harvard students raising money for our ... glee club? I'm not sure. Many people looked at us and put their $10 back in their pockets.
We made enough money that day to upgrade our customary post-selling dinner from veggie burgers to pumpkin ravioli but had no take-home pay and went to work trying to unload the case-plus of shirts. That night we placed the lot on Craigslist Barter with a request list of mostly Air Jordans, protein powders, Arc'Teryx and, if I remember right, Evisu jeans. A few days in, only one guy responded to the ad and ignored our trade requests but asked if we had any more shirts. There were 10+ more cases of unsold trash, many from that summer's Democratic National Convention, and we met him in AJ's car on the Sears side parking lot of the Burlington Mall on a Saturday afternoon and sold him 12 cases for $200--that's 864 T-shirts--turning a slim profit. He emailed AJ later to complain the T-shirts weren't selling well, to which he got no response. A quick skim of the New York Craigslist barter section today reveals an inventory of mostly non-primary-movement gym equipment, as well as a 23' Vista boat owner looking for a "policebike," a veteran barrister trading lawyer services for a reliable car, and two Remy Martin cognac glasses available to open offer. I'm just not sure trading works, then or now, whether in Tweed, Boston or New York.
eBay: 1920s Landon comic course-book Lot: I'm not sure anyone is taking cartooning correspondence courses anymore. I'm less sure learning to draw cartoons in line with pre-war American newspaper editorial style is a good career move. But... there's some good stuff here. It's from a position of ignorance that I am approaching this thing. Which is the better drawing below, the top-left obese guy or the bottom-left?
I can't tell and think both are fine. Are the scribble margins critiquing the top or bottom face? Is one drawn by the teacher and one by the student? Did the student send his drawings back by mail and then the teacher corrected them and this is what we have? Is that the form of a correspondence course? Should I recognize these guys? How has the anchor from Newsradio (USA 1995) managed to live across centuries? This mess of papers from the Landon Course of Cartooning might be the most influential correspondence course of all-time. A dubious honor... Landon, a comics guy at a Cleveland newspaper at the turn of last century and then a honcho at the Newspaper Enterprise Syndicate (later United), ran this course during his spare time. Some of the folks who wrote in and took it eventually went on to impressive careers, one of them was Carl Barks, the guy who did all the good Donald Duck cartoons. That is something. I'm not sure if there's an analogue to something so important being built out of a fly-by-night institution like a mail-order course. Maybe they were better regarded back then... Consensus is that everything in this course holds up if you want to learn the basics. The original artifact might be the best deal in America next to the Sunday New York Times, a street hot dog or a Diet Coke. The course is still in print--a century or so in, it has made second edition.
Thanks for reading. And for subscribing. Be safe in the storm.
Snake
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