Stood up, made my way to the corner. Put the change into the New York Times vending machine and extracted twenty something copies of the paper.

Walked back to the front of Penn Station. With the stack of newspapers under one arm, I removed one, folded it in half and held it up over my head. In a reasonably loud voice I said, "New York Times, one dollar, just one buck! Get your New York Times here!"

You'd be surprised how easy it is to sell something below market value. In less than twenty minutes I had sold out and netted twenty-three dollars plus the original dollar some kind lady had contributed to my coffee cup. This gave me a grand total of twenty-four greenbacks, plenty of seed money for what I had to do next.

Did I mention that it was Saturday?

Time to go to work…

It was a beautiful spring day and was quickly approaching 60 degrees. I stopped to glance at my watch before I realized that I no longer had one. Glanced up at a clock on a building and saw that it was just a little past 9:00am. In terms of doing business, at least for me, it was getting late. Hoofed it down 7th Avenue and ducked into a little coffee shop.

Ordered a cup of coffee and a donut, forgot to tell the Middle Eastern guy behind the counter to make it black. In NY they always add cream unless you tell them otherwise.

Back outside, wolfing down the donut and sipping the coffee, about a half a block up, I came across one of those street dealers that you will only find in Manhattan.

Sitting on the ground with his wares spread out on a blanket, looking and smelling almost as bad as I did. There was an assortment of odds and ends, most of it junk. There was, however, a stack of books that looked as if they may have some age to them. I squatted down and began to go through them.

The most interesting one was "Modern Magic, A Practical Treatise on The Art of Conjuring" by Professor Hoffmann, a cloth bound, turn of the century American edition. Not terribly valuable as things went, but if memory served correctly it should retail around the sixty-five to seventy-five dollar range. Depending on condition, of course.