Buying Lafferty and Not Getting Ripped Off

That photo is of Knight with his friends Terry Bisson and R. A. Lafferty. In my office at the college, I keep it pinned to a corkboard. Someone once said, "Is that your dad?" Then I got to talk about Dan and RAL.

Dan Knight is one of the heroes of Lafferty's publication history and one of my favorite people. I count him a dear friend. Without him, we would not have Dotty. We would not have More Than Melchisedech. We would not have many important Lafferty pieces. Knight was buddies with both Gene Wolfe and Lafferty; one of Wolfe’s best-known characters is based on him, as you might know from Wolfe's dedication to Knight; and Lafferty kept a picture of Knight near his bed in Broken Arrow after his final strokes.

Anyone who has spent time in the Tulsa archive will know that, by far, the largest and most revealing body of Lafferty’s personal correspondence is with Knight. I believe our best view of Lafferty as a person interacting with other people is the Knight-Lafferty friendship. The other contenders are the letters by Sheryl Smith and Virginia Kidd. All Lafferty readers owe him a great debt.

Which brings me to the reason for this post. I noticed the other day that a second-hand dealer was asking $150 for Boomer Flats Gazette, so I wanted to point readers to the place where you can get the rare Knight publications from Knight himself, most of them signed by Lafferty, without the fantastically inflated prices. As I understand it, he still has boxes of them. Anyone who wants to own some of these materials should get them directly from Knight. He is not out to gouge anyone. But Knight isn't self-promoting. You will never see him posting second-hand copies. They are all mint and in boxes at his treasury in Canada. At the same time, you aren't likely to access that treasury without knowing the man himself, so I wanted to share how to get the materials. You can find the link here.

It seemed worth pointing out because of things like this: