As the line was drying up, the crowd apparently consisted mainly of several booksellers. They got talking about first edition printings of the hardcovers for The Eye of the World . Jordan said that he has a whole box of them at home, and that he should give the bunch of them to his son, so he can finance all his children’s college educations… At a later time, he said that he heard recently from a used fantasy dealer that an unsigned first printing The Eye of the World was sold from his store for $700 dollars. RJ said he had heard of prices around $300, but not that high. He also said he heard of first printing Lord of Chaos ‘s going at $55, which he seemed to think was absurd, since well over 200,000 had been printed. They also commented that at times, the hardcovers have been hard to find, but not because they had been out of print, but because “sensible” people assumed they would be out of print. He said that his books “break the rules”, in that hardcovers aren’t supposed to stay in print for 8-9 years. He also said that at one point, a computer “glitch” resulted in stores remaindering The Shadow Rising while there was still a high demand for it at the normal price (10,000 sales annually without any advertising). Someone else mentioned that they had been to a bookstore recently which had the hardcover A Crown of Swords both for sale at the regular price and on the remaindering table. Jordan expressed significant disgust with screw-ups of this sort.
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