 Guy who I was sharing studio space was doing an album compilation of vintage surf music and he had contacted, or the art director had contacted, Leroy Granison got a big stack of his photos. And once I saw those, I went back to that place in time saying, God, I remember that photo. And these are so cool. And there's got to be a book here somehow. I like to say, you know, for almost 40 years or 40 plus years, I've been going to the flea market at 530 in the morning. I get up at 530 and I'm usually on there at 630 because you have to, if you want to get the best stuff, it's when they're pulling it out of their cars. And so over the over the years, I've developed relationships with these folks. So there's people who come on a regular basis and they go every, you know, they're there every week or every month and they know who I am. And so we've struck up conversations and they'll say, well, what are you looking for? And then they know what I'm looking for. So then they'll start when they find stuff, they'll hold it for me. And they won't let it out to someone else. So that's the good thing of the repetitiveness. And they know if you're a good customer and you buy stuff from them, you know, they're gonna, they're gonna hold stuff for you. I still really enjoy it. It's, it's, it's one of those things that I look forward to every Sunday because you don't know what you're going to find. You know, there still is this thing of, you know, what is, you know, what's going to be there? What are you going to find this week? That's a little bit of a problem only because my, my collecting range is really broad. Inevitably, I'll bring something home. In those, those 40-some years that I've been looking, I think I've only come back from the flea market with nothing twice. The other aspect was I, I loved the history behind the objects. They just weren't appealing visually, but it was also the history that was behind it. So when I started finding stuff that related to LA's history in terms of paper, that fed even more. It's like, wow, I didn't know that that place existed, but it was on a match cover. It was on a brochure or was in a scrapbook that I found, and that kept spurring, you know, more interest. One that would be the most, most interesting to me would be the history of night clubs in Los Angeles because that had all the, you know, my parents' stories could be incorporated into that. I was discovering, you know, playbills and catalogs and photographs. And I specifically went to the library looking for that stuff and talking to the librarians and they would leave me to other places and other archives and going to microfilm and sitting for hours and hours and hours in front of the microfilm machine trying to find all of the history of all these night clubs by virtue of the newspaper. So that was kind of my zen moment with being to go to the microfilm room and spend eight hours straight getting up looking at microfilm. Then, you know, I would find the newspapers at the flea market and then there were the, the microfilm would be the ads and I would buy the newspaper and I'd have the actual ad. Completely aware of the fact of the historical significance of the stuff that I collect and the depth of certain subject matter that I've collected because there are certain subjects that I have collected over 40, you know, plus years that no one else has. And, you know, and historically I know that it's significant and that it serves a broader purpose other than just having a bunch of stuff in a bunch of boxes and files. It's an end, in turn, I've tried to make books out of those so that what I've discovered then becomes public information. I don't want to hoard it. I don't want to have it in a box. I don't want to hide it. I don't want to, you know, it has to be shared. That really is something that's really the heart of what it is that my collecting, you know, and telling is all about. When I kind of ended officially my studio time in the early 2000s and focused strictly working for Toschan, then, you know, those collections became the core of what I was doing for Toschan in terms of publishing books and still is to this day. So all of that stuff, you know, works its way into books for primarily for Toschan. And when they're throwing stuff out or at the flea market, someone will say, ah, no, no, no, we can't throw that away. You know, I saw that in a book. Seven years ago, an internet Toschan, I pulled him once he was done with his internship and said, do you want to work for me? And he said, yes. And so for seven years, he's been documenting and scanning and databaseing the stuff. And after seven years, he's probably through about 20% of the collection. Benek and I were talking about ideas to do for books. And I said, you know, there's this guy who's probably in his 80s, and he did like the coolest surfing photography in the 60s. And I think, you know, his work could make really a great book because we had been working on a book with Julius Shulman, who is an architectural photographer. And Benek likes to work with older guys and kind of find these hidden archives and bring them to the forefront. And so I thought, man, you know, Granus might be a really good person for him to, you know, take a look at. So I showed him the photos that I had still kept. And so I went down to Carl's Baton. He was in a trailer with his wife. And so we had a conversation. I said, you know, I work for this publishing company. And would you be interested in maybe doing a book? And I was aware that he already had a book on his surfing photography, but it was done by surfers, which was a little bit different than what I was thinking of because I saw in his photos, surfing culture, the skateboarding stuff, and the fashion shots, and the cars, and all the other really kind of cool stuff from the 60s that most people related to, because that was what people were looking at. This was kind of the key stuff. And so he said, yeah, we can do a book. So we put a deal together. And that book came out first. And that was highly successful. Guys who were surfers said, you know what, that's one of the best books on surfing that we've ever seen. And it's because it came from a perspective of someone who wasn't a surfer. Because you saw stuff that surfers aren't going to see. And I said, I knew what I was looking for. I mean, I knew exactly what I wanted that book to be. And I knew that Granis had this cool stuff that everybody who, if you're a surfer or not, you relate to that kind of stuff. So I hooked him up with a gallery in West Hollywood who started selling his prints for $3,000 to $10,000 a piece. And so that was something I was very proud of in terms of taking this kind of obscure surfing photographer and who was living in a trailer and selling prints for $10, $15, $25 to a guy who was recognized as one of the pioneers of photography, surfing photography, and took him to a place that he made a lot, a lot of money and was recognized in a much wider scope by people. The Getty was thinking about buying his stuff. He got a show, this show in West Hollywood was huge. He sold out. He got a full page in the New York Times. He got a full page in the LA Times, a gallery in New York picked him up and still sells his stuff. So it was, that was very satisfying to see this guy who was kind of a, you know, hidden from everybody. And all of a sudden, you know, in the kind of twilight years of his life was recognized and made a lot of money and he died a happy guy.