The bargain of the year has gotten bargainer. The big 1200-page book called MAD's Greatest Artists: The Completely MAD Don Martin was originally $142 and it wasn't overpriced for that amount. It's a handsome collection of everything the great Don Martin drew for MAD, along with little essays about him by friends and co-workers. I got mine at a price slightly discounted from that and I felt I'd gotten my money's worth.
But then I told you here that it had been dropped to $25, which is quite a plunge. I mean, even Mel Gibson's popularity hasn't dropped that much. Several hundred of you pounced to order copies from Barnes & Noble through my links and many wrote to tell me how happy they were with their score.
Barnes & Noble ran out of them. Then they got some more. Then they ran out of them. Then they got some more. Then they ran out of them. Now, they have some more and they're down to $20. That's insane. If you needed a good doorstop that weighed this much, it would cost you more than twenty bucks. I'm guessing we may be down to the copies that have more dings and defects in them but if you ran a Buick over a copy of this book, it would still be worth more than $20 in the resulting condition. So here's a link to order one.
But wait! That's $20 plus shipping. Wanna get out of paying for shipping? If you already have a Barnes & Noble card, you don't pay shipping so that problem's solved. If you don't have such a card, order something else and get your order up to $25 to qualify for free shipping. Depending on where you live, that may even be cheaper than paying postage.
By the way: Here's something I don't understand. Amazon usually matches or beats anyone else's prices on things like this but for this item, this is the situation: They're selling it on this page for $94.50 and on this page for $58.50 and they also front for a whole bunch of online retailers who are selling it new for $29.90 and up. The $94.50 page currently says that they're almost out but more copies are on the way, which would suggest there are people paying that price for it even though if they read the fine print on that page, they could save sixty bucks. As far as I know, these are all copies of the same book from the same press run. It's enough to make a Don Martin fan go "Voink!" or "Greep!" or even "Sprizzit!"