Woori Yallock School and District: A Short History by Shirley W. Wiencke.

Woori Yallock School and District: A Short History by Shirley W. Wiencke.  Paperback booklet self published (?) (no date, probably 1974).

(Woori Yallock is a small town here in Victoria, situated somewhere between Lilydale and Warburton, it has a population of around 2,800… so it’s a bit bigger than where I live.) 

This little booklet is something that I stumbled across quite by accident.  I didn’t buy it.  I didn’t pick it up.  So where did this magical mystery booklet come from?  Well, it was accidentally inserted in another book, totally unrelated to Woori Yallock, that I did pick up and purchase (… everyone’s dream is to find a $100 note squirreled away in a book…  and all I find is a history of Woori Yallock… no offence meant to the residents of Woori Yallock).  What is interesting is that if I have of found this book, I would have picked it up.  This kind of local history is something that I tend to buy and list on ebay to varying success.  Sometimes you get lucky and a little inconspicuous self published booklet like this one, can be worth the big $... but more often than not, its worth just under $10… or nothing.  Of course when you’ve paid what I paid for this book anything is a good margin… The implication that a free book has a great profit margin, is possibly a little misleading.  I did of course have to drive to the place where I found the book and I did have to spend time looking through books to find the other book that I did purchase.  I also had to clean the book and spend time describing it, scanning it and then listing it (ebay).  I then had to relist it (it didn’t sell the first time around) and of course I have also spent time writing about it here.  If it sells, I will then have to pack it up and go to the post office, which is of course more time and we all know what time is*.  There’s a lot of work and effort that goes into this bookselling business.  Sometimes I despair at the amount of time and effort it takes.  It would be lovely to find all those easy to sell $100 books (key words here are “easy to sell”), but that isn’t the nature of this business… at least not the nature of my business.  I’ve found over the years that any book worth $$$ is more often than not, jinxed.  Any book valued under $20 is a much easier sell… which is why I tend to pick up books like “Woori Yallock School and District: A Short History”…  and always hope that there’s a $100 note in it.

*Money