Crazy two days back in the office. Spent all day yesterday moving the entire stock of BBB books, all 17,000 of them, to a new home in Scottsdale.
It was 25 years ago that Theresa Broniarczyk and Chris Sicarella teamed up with me to produce Tri Star Boze, the publishing arm for all my Old West books. We sold more than 80,000 books, but with the death last month of Chris Sicurella, Theresa decided she wanted to move on, so Ken Amorosano and I bought all the back stock inventory. Here we are moving 2,000 pound pallets with a fork lift. We rented a 26-foot Penske truck and motored out to the westside of Phoenix where we found 14 pallets of books, upstairs in a warehouse on Olive Avenue:
Pallet building upstairs at the old Tri Star Boze building
And then once the pallets were built they had to be hauled to the edge:
Our hired kid, Mike, pushes a 2,000 pound pallet jack into position for our fork lift operator:
Our "novice" fork lift operator then loaded off the pallets down onto the main floor and out the door where we stacked the 14 pallets in the alleyway:
14 pallets of BBB books waiting to be loaded
Our intrepid fork lift operator
Yes, Ken had never operated a fork lift before, but he bailed right in and moved those suckers like a pro. It was scary work, at least to me. Lots of dangling poundage and pallet jack sweaty palms on precarious lift gates. This took four of us half a day to load all of the books onto the truck. Then it was off to Scottsdale where we rented storage space:
The truck is too tall for the opening, but we managed anyway.
Took us all day. In fact, Ken and I have to go back down this morning to bring a pallet's worth up to the True West World Headquarters for shipping. Lots of orders already. A new beginning for an old enterprise. Several new titles in the works, including books on Mickey Free, Wyatt Earp In Hollywood: the untold story and a new take on Billy the Kid In Anton Chico.
"Each new venture is a new beginning—a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment, always deteriorating."
—T.S. Elliot