Have you ever found a treasure online and thought, “SCORE!”? Recently, I was looking through the monthly Rare Finds email from Half Price Books and came across a Harlan Ellison title. My husband is a huge Ellison fan, so I’m always on the hunt for things he doesn’t have. I noticed HPB had a hardback copy of Shatterday. After sneakily scouring his Ellison shelves (yes, he has more than one), I realized he didn’t have a copy. Cool. Then I read through the listing and saw that Ellison signed it. Double cool. I placed my order immediately…I know the featured items go quickly. I told my husband I had a surprise for him coming, and the waiting began.
About five days later, the package arrives. I open it and check it out. It’s in very good condition and ended up being a 3rd printing. Inside the book, I find the publisher’s promo release, a definite surprise! I check out the signature and see that the book is actually inscribed. My husband happens to be across the kitchen and I tell him, while holding up the book, “Here is your present. I thought it was just signed, but it looks like this book is inscribed.” I read him the inscription “For Rory Root, for a comic book.”
Being an Ellison fanatic, he was immediately intrigued. He knew Ellison was a huge comic collector, so he was curious about who Rory Root was and which comic was traded for the book. A quick Google search revealed that Rory Root was a fixture of the comic book scene in Berkeley, CA during the 1980s and 1990s. He and a business partner opened Comic Relief, one of the most renowned comic stores, in 1987. They were one of the first stores to stock graphic novels, well before their rise in popularity. He was also a staunch supporter of self-published and minicomics artists. Because of this, Mr. Root won the Will Eisner Spirit of Retailing award in 1993, presented by Comic-Con International: San Diego. Mr. Root was such a supporter of the genre, that he practically became a cult figure. He was one of the villagers in Jeff Smith’s Bone, his ever present jumbo-sized cup of coffee ended up in Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys and it is even rumored that he was one of the 2 comic book slingers who inspired Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons.
After learning all about Mr. Root and his impact on the genre of comics and graphic novels, my husband and I realized that not only did he add a book to his Ellison collection, but that book was way cooler than either of us could have dreamed. Who would have known that we would own a book that would hold such pop culture coolness? None of which I would have dreamed of when ordering a book online. I’ll be honest; I am a tactile book buyer. I like to hold a book before buying it. I prefer wandering the aisles of a store searching for that particular tome. Through this experience, I have learned that the magic of books can be found online just as much as in a store. As for my husband? He’s still trying to solve the puzzle that started with us wondering who Ellison traded his signed book with…and for a comic, no less! Now he is on the hunt to find out which specific comic book led to the signature that was inscribed in the novel that’s become a gem in his collection.