Buying Things: I. Access

When I was seven or so I discovered a marvelous book in the only bookcase in the house-- Killers in Africa by Alexander Lake. It was a Book of the Month selection, so perhaps my parents had once been members.

Lake was a safari guide and big game hunter in Africa in the first couple of decades of the XXth century. Killers in Africa was filled with adventure, but what I really liked about it was Lake's descriptions of  the behavior of Africa's big game animals. He knew and respected them. At the time I thought it ironic, since he made his living helping his clients kill them. Today I suspect a lot of the early professional hunters felt the same way.

Every couple of years I would I re-read Lake's book. That wasn't lost upon my mother, yet she handed it down not to me, but to one of my siblings. None of the three had ever expressed any interest in it.

Due to its BOMC status, many copies of Killers in Africa were printed. It couldn't have been scarce, yet in twenty years of scouring bookstores I never turned up a copy. After a decade or so I came across Lake's other book about Africa, Hunter's Choice, but Killers in Africa eluded me even though I asked booksellers to keep an eye out for me and even advertised on occasion in their trade magazines.

These days I can locate copies in an instant on eBay, at Advanced Book Exchange, or on Amazon.com--  both the original 1953 edition and the edition reprinted by Mike Resnick.

The internet has allowed me to find the lost toys of my youth and locate toys I wanted but never got. As I write this, a jar of sea monkey eggs is incubating in a Ball jar on my kitchen island. It's all one click and a five day wait away.

I no longer have to drive all over town looking for a product. I don't have to spend the time, and I don't have to buy the gas, and best of all, I don't have to settle for something that only vaguely resembles what I'm looking for. I think it's great.