Read: The Ghost of Dibble Hollow
Patience is important. That’s what I really want to say. Patience is important.
See, there’s this book, The Ghost of Dibble Hollow (by May Nickerson Wallace, whom I know exactly nothing about). It’s a kids’ adventure book from 1965, about a boy who spends the summer in the country, in a house that’s long abandoned but has been in his family for a long time. He meets the ghost of his great-uncle, who died as a boy way back when. Not a great book, but enjoyable and readable. I had a copy when I was young but I don’t know what happened to it.
I decided a few years ago to try to track down another copy, partly because I liked the book and partly to use for inspiration for this one project I’ve had on the back burner for a while. And it turned out to be really hard to find. When I checked on abebooks.com and alibris.com, all I could find were copies for like $50, $80 bucks. Which, forget that.
So I bided my time and kept my eyes open. And earlier this month I was at a used book sale where I plucked a copy of The Ghost of Dibble Hollow off one of the kids’ tables for a buck.
Math: $50 cost + patience = $1 cost.
Matthew Elmslie 
I had a very similar experience…found a copy of “The Ghost…” at a flea market, and was utterly thrilled for the rest of the weekend. Great kid-lit…had a short correspondence with the author re: the story rights, but Disney owns them (though has been sitting on them for about 40 years now. Grrrr…).
That’s interesting. I guess we have to conclude that if Disney was going to do something with it, they would have done it already. Doesn’t seem like their kind of thing for these days.