Hey, libertarian buddies (and anyone else, for that matter).

Vin Suprynowicz has this in his column today -- an opportunity to help someone outand get a good book in the process. It involves a gift he gave to author Claire Wolfe, and how it ended up on E-Bay.

Like a small stone starting a landslide, you never know where some small act of generosity may lead.

A couple of weeks back, I sent an autographed copy of the leatherbound collector's edition of "The Black Arrow" to Claire Wolfe, a fellow author whose contributions to the freedom movement include "Don't Shoot the Bastards (Yet)" and most recently (with Aaron Zelman of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership) the young people's novel "Rebelfire: Out of the Gray Zone."
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It's Christmas time. I wanted to acknowledge Claire's help and support. As an act of generosity, sending off a book that retails at $48.95 was not exactly something to write home about.

As it turns out, Walter Bark, the founding webmaster and guiding spirit of The Claire Files discussion forums has cancer, and is not expected to be with us much longer. Claire reports that, up Montana way, his friends Elias Alias, Basil Fishbone, and Iloilo Jones have been bearing the entire cost of the herbal (and other) medicines that are making Bark's final days tolerable.

Claire e-mailed to ask if I would object to her putting her autographed book up for auction on e-Bay, with the proceeds going to cover some of the costs of Walter's care.

I said fine -- it's her book now, after all. Hers, as well, is all the credit for this generous gesture. I did joke that I'd try to resist the Philistine urge to someday declare that a copy of one of my books had "sold for hundreds of dollars on e-Bay."

We both laughed at that "hundreds of dollars" part. The book went up for bids Wednesday, with an account of the charitable use to which the proceeds would be put, at a starting bid of $19.95, and a reserve of $39.95.

Claire was very pleased when the reserve was reached within hours. She offered to take back her expression of amusement about my "hundreds of dollars" comment when, by suppertime, it hit $305. She proceeded to declare herself "speechless" at around $400, I believe. As I sit down to write this at lunchtime Thursday, bidding has reached $615.

Make no mistake: no one thinks a single copy of this book is worth $615. What's happening is a spontaneous outpouring of generosity, without compulsion, without publicity (well, till now), without any firm guiding hand of government telling anyone how much it's his or her "duty to share."

It's tempting to say we don't know the ending, since the auction doesn't wrap up till Monday.

But in fact, we already know this story has a happy ending. Don't we?

Merry Christmas.

You stil have time to get the book and make a dying man's last days comfortable, so bid NOW.

God bless you Vin. God bless you, Clair. And most especially, God bless you Walter, whose writings i've never read -- may your days, be they many or few, be filled with comfort, joy, and love.

Posted by: Greg at 02:39 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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