Two out of three grails ain't bad

For the past few decades, there were always three paperback books I was looking for in every single second hand bookstore I went to. It seemed almost impossible that I'd find any of them, but I've snapped up two of the books so far, and always have hope for the future of the third.

They were my grail books, and are all out of print, and aggressively so. They might be freely available in other parts of the world, but I could never find them anywhere near me, and was devoted to the chase. 

I got the first one more than a decade ago - Marc Platt's Lungbarrow. When I was obsessed with  the New Adventures in the 90s, Lungbarrow always seemed like an impossibility, I would literally dream about finding it. I only got into the book series towards the end of the Virgin era, just before BBC Books grabbed the rights back, and those final books were only in print for a few short months before vanishing from bookshelves altogether. I did get some rarities like So Vile A Sin off the shelf at my local chain bookshop, but Lungbarrow, the one where the good Doctor finally goes home, was not one of them.

After getting the rest of the series on the second hand market, I finally found Lungbarrow a few years back in the most random store. It was still very expensive, (but hasn't got any cheaper since), but it was the one I needed for the complete set of those books, so no price was too high.

The second book was the Doc Savage biography by Phillip Jose Farmer, which I've been gagging for since reading about it in a Starlog magazine eons ago. I got all the other Tarzan and Savage books that Farmer produced, including the barely-concealed variants, but the book about Savage's life was always out of reach. I ended up accidentally buying the Tarzan memoir three or four times because I kept seeing it with different covers, but there was no Savage.

And then I found it just last week, in a second hand bookshop, just sitting in the shelves. I snapped that puppy up, and look forward to getting stuck into it, but am worried that this kind of random discovery will only get rarer, because that bookstore has an uncertain future, due to the usual 'landlord is a shithead' issues.  

So maybe it'll be straight up impossible to find that third grail book - Grant Morrison's Lovely Biscuits, a collection of the writer's prose that came out sometime in their 90s prime. And even though I know it was a tiny print run on a tiny publisher, I still look for it every time I'm in a second hand bookstore.

I could get a copy from the internet, it's just a question of how much I'll pay, but if I did that, what then? What would I look for? That would be the end of the fun, and giving into online temptation destroys that moment where I do stumble across it in some hospice store or something. 

I haven't ever seen Lovely Biscuits out in the wild, and maybe I never will, but I won't stop looking, because that's what a grail quest is all about.