Sayonara Self-Published Book...

- Not to be melodramatic about it, but I'm now in the process of ripping up and throwing my approximately 1,800 remaining copies of my self-published book, "The LL-Letters - by Lyle 宏 Saxon & E-Friends" (written in 1999 and published in 2001) into the garbage.

- I still believe in the concept that "There's profound in the mundane, and mundane in the profound", and I think there are a certain number of people out there who would enjoy reading the book, but I don't know how to reach them, and the physical size the 1,800 books are consuming in my small apartment has become an issue, so I've begun to (reluctantly) throw them away.
- I don't want to just put them, as-is, in the garbage though, so I'm first ripping the covers and first pages off (which I in turn rip up and throw away separately).
- And there's another looming issue (aside from not being able to sell them - or even give them away).  It's become increasingly difficult and expensive to throw things away, so I want to get rid of this physical burden before trash disposal rates go up.  Never mind the expression "They couldn't give them away!", that's now becoming "They couldn't afford to pay for them to be thrown away"!
- Naturally, I'm not going to throw all 1,800 remaining copies away, but I'll probably only keep two or three hundred of them.
 - ..... I was going to go on writing more about this, but the more I write, the more depressed I'm getting, so I'll stop here and get back to work on destroying my book.

Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
youtube.com/lylehsaxon
lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/
lookback1997.blogspot.jp/
tokyoht.blogspot.jp/

1990年 コミックマーケット３８カタログ

1990年 コミックマーケット３８カタログ '90 Summer - On one of my video recording trips in Tokyo in 1990, I noticed an event and took a peek inside - to discover that it was a huge manga convention.  I remember being surprised at the time that there was a convention just for that, and as I was looking inside, some friendly people at a table by the entrance gave me a catalog for the event.

I put it in my backpack and when I got home, put it in a box.  Over the years, it has resurfaced from time to time and I've always felt it was valuable, a kind of dictionary of manga at that time, but never really spent time going through it in detail. 

Fast forward to 2018 and it resurfaced yet again while I was in the middle of a fairly aggressive effort to reduce the number of things I have.  I took a quick video of it (which I posted to YouTube) and was about to throw it away when I remembered it fell within my "1990-93 Exception" - an exception I made for things to escape going into the garbage if they were from the same period as my early 1990's videos. 

And here it is... (148 pages of the 554 total).  I don:t know exactly how rare it is, or exactly how much interest there is in it, but whatever other people think, I think it has a great value.  Summer 1990 was the last summer of the "bubble economy" years and was before manga were popular outside of Japan.

I'm sure there are a certain number of copies of this catalog out there somewhere, but this was from 28 years ago (as I write this in 2018), so certainly a number of copies of this have disappeared over the years.  Taking a look at my YouTube channel, I'm not finding anything from either August 18, 1990 or August 19, 1990, but I'm pretty sure I was out taking video, so (presumably, hopefully) there's footage from that day.  I didn't go in and spend much time there, since I was in the area for other reasons, but I think I took a quick video at the entrance....

Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon
www5d.biglobe.ne.jp/~LLLtrs/
youtube.com/lylehsaxon
lylehsaxon.blogspot.jp/
lookback1997.blogspot.jp/
tokyoht.blogspot.jp/