Yeah, I'm back. Pinky wont have to chow down on my Buster Browns. And quite a bit happened while I was away. →[More:]The other day, one of my co-workers found a silver liquor flask shaped like a cellphone in a box of books he was unloading. Today, the same thing happened to me, only it was a live cockroach. Not the same. The lady did tip me $3 though. I guess she felt bad.

Yesterday though, I met RICHARD PRICE! He did a stock signing in our rare book room on the third floor. My manager, knowing what a fanboy I am, sent me up there on the pretense of getting a signature for him. I went up and we shot the breeze for about twenty minutes. He was an incredibly cool and friendly guy. He was impressed with where pips teaches school and seeing my Dictators t-shirt, gave me the inside dope on the Price/Dictators connection* and a host of other topics, and a personalized inscription on my copy of his latest**. He'll be at the Union Square B&N April 3. I'll be there, maybe some of you guys will be too.

The same day, one of our periodic regulars came in with a load of arcane math and engineering textbooks. We bought them for around $3000. She's a generous tipper, so when she put a bill in my palm, I thanked her, expecting a ten or twenty. It was a fifty. I had already made about $9 in tips that day and I made another twelve today, so I'm rewarding myself with some stinky cheese from Murray's on Bleeker and a big bottle of Brooklyn Local 1.

*Apparently Price's little brother Randy was in the same homeroom as Dictators bassist Andy Shernoff and they were invited to a gig, where he was introduced not as 'mr. famous bigshot author' but as 'Randy's brother.' They did name an album after Price's second novel and take the cover photo in the playground of the Parkside Houses, the Bronx housing project where Price grew up.

**it's really good, you should read it