It’s been a while since my last – not to mention only – artbook post, not in the least because I don’t do much purchasing of obscure anime goods; somehow, my sense of reason has managed to continue outstripping the little anime fan in my head that screams “moeeeeee~” at every figurine, pencil board, and plushie that I see.

This may be a result of the fact that these novelty goods are, to be subtle, ridiculously expensive at times. Probably mostly because I’m a student on an overly cheap budget, first and foremost, but secondly because, well, I don’t see what you can do with a figurine outside of taking pictures of it, playing Smash Bros. with it, or making disturbing 4chan gifs with it.

Artbooks, though, have been a fondness of mine, if only because they tend to give some semblance of value to me – after all, you can browse them over and over, they have lots of pretty pictures, and if I ever actually manage to learn Japanese they might just be good reading material.

Additionally, I’ve recently become figuratively married to a little bookstore chain in southern California called Book Off, which offers a lot of new and used books (of which I can hardly tell the difference), ranging from standard English novels, to manga in both languages, to magazines, and – as you may have guessed – quite a few anime artbooks. Depending on the chain, you might even find some DVDs of both regions (spotted some Japanese Shuffle! LEs and AIR and Tsukihime boxsets), or import video games.And all at great prices too – my previous purchase of the Shuffle! On the Stage artbook was half the price I saw at Kinokuniya. Good stuff.

Unfortunately however I am not getting paid royalty fees for this post so I’ll move on to the two latest artbooks I added to my meager collection, and that would be that of Cardcaptor Sakura and Da Capo.

(Note this post actually has pictures, so those of you stuck under a 56K rock still, look out. And for those wondering about the camera work, well, let’s say my house was undergoing a small earthquake during the five minutes I was filming. Or maybe my camera hand was drunk. Maybe you need glasses. Or maybe it was a rush job and I was using a borrowed camera.)
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